Top officers of Morbi district police as well as bomb disposal squad (BDS) from Rajkot reached the spot late evening. Mumbai police on Thursday registered a second FIR against celebrity car designer Dilip Chhabria, who was arrested last month in a cheating and forgery case. Comedian and actor Kapil Sharma is the complainant in the second FIR that was registered by the police on Thursday.
Joint commissioner of police (crime) Milind Bharambe said between March and May 2017, Sharma had paid Chhabria, who owns Dilip Chhabria Designs Pvt Ltd (DCDPL), Rs 5.3 crore to design a vanity bus for him. Later in 2018, he paid another Rs 40 lakh to Chhabria as the latter stated that the price of designing the vehicle had gone up after the government introduced the goods and services tax.
“When there was no progress made till 2019, Sharma approached the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) that after initial hearings directed that DCDPL bank accounts be frozen,” Bharambe said. Earlier this year, when Chhabria sent a bill of Rs 12 lakh to Sharma as parking charges for the spot where the yet-to-be-completed vanity van was about to be kept, the comedian approached the police.
“In September 2020, Sharma approached the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) and lodged a complaint against Chhabria. The EOW was conducting a preliminary enquiry (PE) when the crime branch arrested Chabbria in another fraud case last month,” Bharambe added.
“Accordingly, we called Sharma to record his statement following which the PE, registered by the EOW, was converted into an FIR and the matter is being investigated. The FIR is on the charges of criminal misappropriation and cheating,” the officer added.
Chhabria was arrested on December 28 by the Mumbai police crime branch on the allegations that he had been registering some of the DC Avanti sports cars, designed and manufactured by his company, in two places. He would then allegedly use these vehicles to get loans for himself from non-banking financial institutions (NBFCs) and then sell it off to customers without informing them about the loan.