ED attaches assets worth over Rs 50 crore of Maharashtra MLA Rohit Pawar’s company
The agency attached properties belonging to Kannad Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana Limited, which is owned by a company named Baramati Agro Limited. Rohit Pawar – the MLA from the Karjat-Jamkhed constituency and the grandnephew of Nationalist Congress Party founder Sharad Pawar – owns Baramati Agro Limited.
The attached assets consist of 161.30 acres of land, a building and machinery of the cooperative sugar factory located in the town of Kannad in the Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar district.
The Enforcement Directorate began investigating the case based on a first information report registered by the Mumbai Police’s Economic Offences Wing. The police alleged that officials at the Maharashtra State Cooperative Bank fraudulently sold cooperative sugar factories to their relatives or other private persons at throwaway prices without following due procedure.
The Enforcement Directorate claimed that the bank, in order to recover an outstanding loan of Kannad Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana Limited, took possession of all its assets under the Securitisation and Reconstruction of Financial Assets and Enforcement of Security Interest Act.
Unidentified sources from the central agency told The Indian Express that Baramati Agro Limited may have connived with a firm named Hitech Engineering to bid for Kannad Sahakari Sakhar Karkhana Limited, and to win the auction through manipulation.
Responding to the Enforcement Directorate attaching his properties, Rohit Pawar said that he would not join the Bharatiya Janata Party despite the action taken against him by the central agency.
“The BJP should remember that those who bent [under pressure], have long gone,” he said, according to The Indian Express. “We are here to fight till the end and win.” The MLA added that he would go to court against the “illegal action”.
Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar) leader Supriya Sule said that the Enforcement Directorate’s action amounted to “misuse of power”, PTI reported.
Sule claimed that Rohit Pawar was not named in the original case registered by the Maharashtra government’s Economic Offences Wing. She said that the Economic Offences Wing had filed a closure report in that case. “But the Enforcement Directorate had opposed the report,” she said.
Sule also said that the Economic Offences Wing’s first information report had names of members from the BJP and its allies.
“What sort of justice is this?” she asked. “If someone has made a mistake, you are free to take action, but just because he is fighting for and speaking the truth…would not this action be injustice to him?”
