The Faridabad police has nabbed a group of cybercriminals who allegedly misappropriated the Rebate of State and Central Taxes and Levies licenses to dupe Sonam Kapoor’s father-in-law Harish Ahuja’s firm Shahi Export Factory, PTI reported.
The group had purportedly been using his forged Digital Signature Certificate to transfer the ROSCTL licenses given to Ahuja’s firms to fake firms and encashing them.
Faridabad Deputy Commissioner of Police Nitish Agarwal told the agency that the fraudsters secured a total of 154 ROSCTLs worth Rs 27.61 crore of Ahuja’s company. The DCP also informed that the group would either transfer the licenses to other firms or fake firms.
The accused have been identified as Manish Kumar, Manoj Rana, Lalit Kumar Jain, Praveen Kumar, and Manish Kumar Moga from Delhi, Bhushan Kishan Thakur from Mumbai, Ganesh Parsuram from Karnataka, Rahul Raghunath from Raigadh, Santosh Sitaram from Pune, and Suresh Kumar Jain from Chennai.
Former Employees of DGFT Also Accused: DCP
The DCP informed that an ROSCTL license is given to export firms by the government entitling them to rebates in custom and excise duties. He added that the police has been ‘working silently’ on Ahuja’s case since July last year. The last arrest was made on 23 December and some former clerks and employees of the Directorate General of Foreign Trade are also among the accused.
The accused who used to work as clerks in DGFT, and were thus familiar with the directorate's functioning, used to secure codes of big export-import firms to see if they’d make good targets for the scam. They’d check the firms’ records and see how much money they had in their accounts and also check how much the ROSCTL coupons assigned to them were worth.
Sonam Kapoor married Anand Ahuja in 2018. Anand is a director in his father Harish Ahuja’s company.
(With inputs from PTI)
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