ED attaches Rs 36 cr assets, bank deposits of Udayanidhi Stalin Foundation

The Enforcement Directorate on Saturday said it has attached immovable assets worth more than Rs 36 crore across Tamil Nadu and Rs 34.7 lakh kept in the bank account of Udayanidhi Stalin Foundation as part of a money laundering investigation.

The probe, being conducted under various sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, is against the Kallal Group and the UK-based Lyca group and its Indian companies Lyca Productions and Lyca Hotels, it said.

The ED had conducted searches against the two entities in April and early this month.

An investigation was launched based on an FIR registered by Central Crime Branch-I, Chennai where it was alleged that the complainant Gaurav Chachra, director of Pettigo Commercio Internacional Lda, had been defrauded of Rs 114.37 crore by the Kallal Group and its directors/founders like Saravanan Palaniappan, Vijaykumaran, Aravinth Raj and Vijay Ananth apart from Lakshmi Muthuraman and Preetha Vijayananth, the ED said in a statement.

Pettigo is a subsidiary of the UK-based Lyca Group, having a significant presence in India in the form of Lyca Productions, Lyca Hotels, etc.

The probe found that the fraud is "actually of an amount of Rs 300 crore as the Lyca Group had also made other investments/loans to the accused group and its entities without any due diligence or rationale."

This resulted into searches against both the accused and complainants and "led to the discovery of various incriminating evidence in the form of digital evidence, documents, properties, suspicious cash and hawala transactions which are still under the ED scanner and investigations," the federal agency said.

In order to secure part of the proceeds of crime, the ED on May 25 provisionally attached various immovable properties across Tamil Nadu valued at Rs 36.3 crore and Rs 34.7 lakh available in the bank account of Udayanidhi Stalin Foundation as "it received proceeds of crime" of Rs 1 crore, it said.

"The trustees of the said foundation failed to explain the rationale for the above receipt from the parties involved in the case," it said.

Lyca Productions is an entertainment company engaged in the production and distribution of Tamil and Hindi movies and it was in the news recently for the two-part Tamil epic films Ponniyin Selvan: I and Ponniyin Selvan: II.