New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate raided the Delhi house of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MP Sanjay Singh Wednesday morning in connection with a money-laundering case linked with Delhi’s excise policy case.
Sources in the agency said premises of several others potentially involved with the alleged scam had also been searched.
The fresh raids came a day after Delhi’s Rouse Avenue Court allowed two accused in the case – Raghav Magunta Reddy and Dinesh Arora – to turn approvers.
Earlier this May, the ED raided properties linked with Singh’s aides.
Sanjay Singh’s name surfaced in a supplementary remand note last year, prompting the MP to send legal notices to then ED director Sanjay Mishra and joint director Jogender Singh.
Sources in the ED later clarified that Singh’s name came up four times in the prosecution’s complaint, out of which one was an “inadvertent/typographical error”.
In May, Sanjay Singh also wrote to Finance Secretary T.V. Somanathan, seeking sanction to prosecute Sanjay Mishra for making “false and derogatory claims” against him in connection with the excise policy case.
The alleged excise scam came to light in 2022 when Lieutenant Governor V.K. Saxena recommended a CBI probe into the AAP government’s 2020-21 excise policy.
He did so after the Delhi chief secretary highlighted that the previous year’s policy had “deliberate and gross procedural lapses” that allowed liquor licensees to get “undue benefits”.
At the time the investigation started into the case, the excise department was headed by then Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia, who was questioned multiple times by CBI officials before being arrested on 26 February this year.
Sisodia was later arrested by the ED on charges of money-laundering which stemmed from the same excise policy case.
The policy was launched by the Delhi government in November 2021 through which it planned to exit the state’s liquor business by handing it over to private players. It was scrapped in July last year after multiple controversies and probes around it.\
Edited by Tikli Basu