New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) Thursday raided 14 locations across the National Capital Region and Haryana, including the residence of Congress leader and Mahendragarh MLA Rao Dan Singh, in connection with a bank loan fraud case.
The raids continued Friday at Dan Singh’s residence in Mahendragarh, and premises linked to him and his son Akshat Singh in Bahadurgarh and Gurugram. In addition, searches were also conducted at premises linked to a firm called Allied Strips and its promoters, Mohinder Agrawal, Gaurav Agrawal and others, across Delhi and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand.
ED sources told ThePrint that action has been initiated against Dan Singh and the company’s promoters, as it was found that the MLA, his family and companies allegedly took huge amounts of loan money for Allied Strips Limited, and later wrote off the funds without repayment.
“There are several transactions by Allied Strips that led to the opening up of an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) in this case. The ECIR was filed last year,” an ED official said.
The ED’s money laundering probe stems from an FIR filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation in April 2022 on a complaint by Canara Bank, alleging that Allied Strips had defrauded a consortium of banks led by it of Rs 1,392.86 crore.
Dan Singh is a four-time Congress MLA from the Mahendragarh assembly seat in Haryana in the Ahirwal region. He is considered a close confidant of the Leader of the Opposition in the assembly, Bhupinder Singh Hooda.
A businessman by profession, Dan Singh (68) was fielded by the Congress from the Bhiwani-Mahendragarh constituency in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, instead of former MP Shruti Choudhry, a granddaughter for former Haryana chief minister, late Bansi Lal.
However, he lost to Bharatiya Janata Party’s Dharambir Singh by a margin of 41,510 votes.
Dan Singh’s son, Akshat, is married to the daughter of BJP leader Rao Narbir Singh, a minister in the Manohar Lal Khattar-led government from 2014 to 2019. Akshat Rao aspires to contest the upcoming assembly elections this year.
During the Lok Sabha election campaign, Akshat had faced veiled attacks from Shruti and her mother Kiran Choudhry, a former Haryana minister, because of his alleged involvement in the Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society scam. Akshat had claimed the allegations against him were old and that he had been granted bail in that case.
Shruti and Kiran had quit the Congress party after the elections to join BJP.
Dan Singh won the Mahendragarh Assembly seat four times, defeating BJP stalwart Rambilas Sharma in 2000, 2005, 2009 and 2019. In 2014, he had lost this seat to Sharma, when the BJP had come to power in Haryana on its own for the first time.
Born in Pahladgarh village of Bhiwani district, Dan Singh holds a masters degree from Panjab University, Chandigarh, and also a law and an MBA degree from Rajasthan University, Jaipur. He was also the president of the Haryana Football Association in 2012.
Doubts over genuineness of transaction
According to Canara Bank’s allegations, it was dealing with Delhi-based Allied Strips, which has been manufacturing cold rolled steel strips and hot rolled steel coils since 2000. The company had five NPA (non-performing asset) accounts with the consortium, including UCO Bank, Punjab National Bank, erstwhile Oriental Bank of Commerce and Dena Bank (merged into Bank of Baroda) by January 2014.
Canara Bank, in its March 2022 complaint to the CBI, had alleged that the promoters of the company had informed their inability to pay monthly installments on loans in November 2012, and that they had cited “acute liquidity” problems behind their inability to pay installments for December 2012.
Following this, the consortium had agreed on restructuring of the debt, which was implemented on 30 December, 2013.
However, as the company’s promoters failed to comply with the terms of corporate debt restructuring, such as infusion of funds into the company from their own sources, the consortium decided that the company did not have any “concrete action plan”, and declared its accounts as NPAs in 2014.
The forensic audit of the company’s accounts revealed that the company had, in March 2015, written off bad debt amounting to Rs 31.55 crore without following the due procedure and making “proper” efforts to recover the amount, raising doubts on the genuineness of the lending.
Additionally, Canara Bank had further alleged that the company had paid Rs 7.5 crore to a machinery supplier firm, Higcho Engineers, but machines were never supplied, and neither did the company make any efforts to initiate refund, further raising questions on the transaction.
(Edited by Mannat Chugh)
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