The ED has registered a fresh money laundering case against the owner of a Noida-based firm and others as part of its probe in the alleged Rs 3,700 crore ponzi scam perpetrated by him after promising money in lieu of 'likes' on social media to lakhs of gullible investors.
Officials said the agency has booked a fresh Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), ED equivalent of a police FIR, on the basis of "new facts" arising out of the investigation conducted by it till now against the alleged "mastermind" of the scam and owner of the accused firm Anubhav Mittal and his enterprise.
"He (Mittal) is alleged to have misused forged/expired ISO certificates for portraying the business of his company as a genuine before the public as well as government agencies," the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said in a statement.
It said the agency has moved a fresh application in a competent court seeking permission to interrogate Mittal and others in the "light of new facts".
The ED had in March attached assets worth Rs 599 crore in this case after it registered its first ECIR based on the FIR of the Uttar Pradesh Special Task Force (STF).
The agency will soon record the statement of Mittal's father, Sunil Mittal, who is lodged in Luksar jail in Greater Noida near here.
Mittal, the agency had earlier said, had collected "several thousand crore of rupees from the customers of his company by false inducements and later siphoned off the same by means of generating false or bogus bills/invoices with the assistance of various persons who are under scrutiny".
The ED's zonal office in Lucknow had on January 5 registered a criminal case under the PMLA based on UP Police's STF which had first unearthed the alleged illegal ponzi or multi-level marketing scam.
Describing the modus operandi used by the accused to perpetrate the ponzi scam, the ED had said an analysis of the bank statements of the companies involved reveals a "phenomenal increase" in the number of transactions since March 2016 and during a period of around one month a "turnover of more than Rs 40 crore was achieved".
The central probe agency had said the fraudsters allegedly cheated about 6.5 lakh gullible investors of an estimated Rs 3,700 crore, a fraud many more times in value than the infamous Saradha chit fund scam of West Bengal and Assam which is pegged at Rs 2,500 crore.
Meanwhile, UP police yesterday filed a charge-sheet at the Gautam Buddha Nagar District Court against Mittal and his wife Ayushi, who are both directors at Ablaze Info Solution Private Limited.
Ayushi has got a stay order from the High Court on her arrest, while Mittal and three others have been arrested by the UP STF in this case.
(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)