New Delhi: Weeks after Ghaziabad-resident Harsh Vardhan Jain was arrested for allegedly operating fake embassies of fictitious micronations, more details have emerged about his shady activities. According to a probe by the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force, he planned to launch a polo tournament in Dubai in 2018.
The purported brochure of the proposed tournament shows Jain as one of the advisory board members. It also mentioned the then Representative of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Center in India, as well as several sportspersons, including Sania Mirza, Bhaichung Bhutia, Madan Lal and Chetan Sharma.
This proposed league was to be organised by Jain and a businessman named Shamim Khan. Sources said Shamim Khan has been summoned to join the investigation this month.
In the brochure, accessed by ThePrint, Jain is shown as an honourary diplomat, as he would present himself in several social media posts and also write on the nameplate at his rented office in Ghaziabad’s Kavi Nagar block.
Apart from former Indian sports celebrities, the purported brochure, recovered from files stored in a laptop seized during raids at his residence, also shows Bollywood stars Sharmila Tagore, her son Saif Ali Khan and his wife Kareena Kapoor Khan as “patrons”.
Sources in the Uttar Pradesh Police said they would contact all the celebrities mentioned in the brochure to find out if they were even aware that their pictures and names were used in the brochure.
The tournament, as per the brochure, planned to be held at Dubai’s Meydan Racecourse with 16 teams, including from India, the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.
As ThePrint reported in July, Jain’s empire of fake embassies and honorary ambassadorship of micronations was busted by the STF following months of monitoring and verification of local inputs about his extravagant lifestyle, including his use of a swanky Mercedes S 350 bearing ‘diplomatic stickers’ and flags of non-existent foreign countries.
Later, the Ghaziabad police commissionerate booked him under relevant sections for cheating, forgery, etc under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita on the complaint from the local unit of the STF, which raided his fake embassy, and later took him into custody for questioning.
The STF also found that Jain made more than 100 overseas trips over the last two decades, with nearly half of them (47) to the United Arab Emirates, followed by the United Kingdom, where he travelled at least 21 times.
At the ‘embassy’, the STF found Rs 44.70 lakh in cash, 12 fake passports in Harsh Vardhan’s name, including ‘diplomatic’ ones bearing the names of micronations such as Westartica, and forged Ministry of External Affairs documents, pointing to the magnitude of his illegal activities. They also found watches, an array of rubber stamps, car number plates, and ID cards.
The STF found in its probe that Jain was a frequent visitor to London for work related to his father’s firms and that he met the ‘godman’ Chandraswami in the year 2000.
Chandraswami later introduced him to Saudi Arabia-based arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi and Adnan Rhabhi, a resident of Saudi Arabia, and Ahsan Ali Syed (a London-based Indian businessman).
Sources in the STF said that an investigation is ongoing to find out the extent of the hawala deals carried out by Jain on the pretext of providing jobs to people in foreign countries.
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)
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