Excise policy: ED arrests liquor bizman Mahendru

New Delhi: The ED on Wednesday arrested liquor businessman Sameer Mahendru in connection with its money laundering investigation into alleged irregularities in the now-scrapped Delhi excise policy, official sources said.

Mahendru is the managing director of liquor distributor company Indospirit.

Sources said he was taken into custody under the criminal sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) after he was put through a night-long questioning session at the agency's office in central Delhi.

He is expected to be produced before a local court where the Enforcement Directorate (ED) will seek his further remand.

Mahendru has been questioned earlier by the CBI, which is also probing the case.

The ED action comes a day after the CBI arrested businessman Vijay Nair in the excise policy case in which Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia has been named as an accused.

The money laundering case stems from a CBI FIR and both the federal agencies have undertaken multiple search operations in this case till now. The CBI, in its FIR, has mentioned two instances where Mahendru allegedly made payments totalling about Rs 4-5 crore to "close associates" of Sisodia.

According to the FIR, Sisodia's "close associates"- Amit Arora, director of Buddy Retail Pvt. Limited in Gurugram, Dinesh Arora and Arjun Pandey — were "actively involved in managing and diverting the undue pecuniary advantage collected from liquor licensees" to the accused public servants.

The CBI has alleged that Radha Industries managed by Arora received Rs 1 crore from Mahendru.

"Source further revealed that Arun Ramchandra Pillai used to collect undue pecuniary advantage from Sameer Mahendru for onward transmission to the accused public servants through Vijay Nair. A person named Arjun Pandey had once collected a huge cash amount of about Rs 2-4 crore from Sameer Mahendru on behalf of Vijay Nair," it claimed.