The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday night arrested another businessman, Amit Arora, a close aid of Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, in connection with its money laundering probe in the Delhi excise policy case, official sources said Wednesday.
With Arora, who is the director of Buddy Retail Pvt Limited located in Gurugram, this is ED's sixth arrest in this case.
Arora was arrested last night under the criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), they said. He is expected to be produced before a local court where the agency will seek his custody, the sources said.
The ED case stems from a CBI FIR.
The CBI in a recently filed chargesheet in the case claimed that Amit Arora, with two other accused, Dinesh Arora and Arjun Pandey, are “close associates” of Sisodia and were “actively involved in managing and diverting the undue pecuniary advantage collected from liquor licensees” for the accused public servants.
The ED also filed its first chargesheet (prosecution complaint) in the case last week, naming arrested businessman Sameer Mahandru and few other entities in it.
However, in a recent chargsheet filed by ED, the name of Sisodia was excluded following which he said, "It is a matter of great pride for me that even after all their conspiracies and false FIRs, they are not able to make any allegations against me. My name is not there in the charge sheet prepared by a team of 800 officers after raiding 500 places. The charge sheet of CBI and ED proved that there was no liquor scam."
Manish Sisodia, who was mentioned in the initial CBI FIR, is not mentioned in the current charge sheet, which was submitted 60 days after the investigation was launched.
Notably, the CBI said that the investigation related to the role of public servants in conspiring with the license holders and the money trails related to it are still pending and it will soon file a supplementary charge sheet in this case.
The CBI and ED are both investigating whether the Delhi government's excise policy was framed to provide undue and illegal favours to liquor manufacturers and distributors at the cost of the government exchequer.
(with PTI inputs)
