The Enforcement Directorate (ED) seized “incriminating” documents after it recently carried out raids in Maharashtra as part of a money laundering investigation into alleged irregularities in the tender allocation of the Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana (PMAY) scheme in Aurangabad district of the state. A total of nine locations in Aurangabad, Pune and Akola were searched by the federal probe agency.
The money laundering case stems from a state police FIR which was filed by the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation against firms like Samarath Construction & JV, Indo Global Infrastructure Services, Jaguar Global Services and their respective partners, for “forgery and formation of a cartel” to illegally win the tender of the municipal body for constructing 40,000 PMAY houses at Aurangabad, the ED said in a statement.
The PMAY scheme was to be implemented at seven plots/sites in Aurangabad. “It was found that all the three e-tenders were uploaded from a single IP address. The FIR was registered after the PMAY regulators identified the anomaly that the winning firm was not at all financially capable of implementing such a big project,” the agency said.
