New Delhi: The ED said on Friday that it has attached assets worth nearly Rs 67 crore in a money laundering case related to "illegal" acquisition of land in Haryana's Manesar with alleged connivance of senior government functionaries and bureaucrats.
The agency said a provisional order for attachment of the assets has been issued under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
"The attached assets consist of 14.56 acres of land at Gurgaon (valued at Rs 43.54 crore) belonging to Mahamaya Exports Pvt. Ltd., and four acres of land and bank balances worth Rs 23.03 crore of other accused," the Enforcement Directorate (ED) said in a statement. The total value of the attached properties is Rs 66.57 crore, it said.
Several farmers and land owners alleged that they had been cheated to the tune of about Rs 1,500 crore in the case, in which Congress leader and former Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda is one of the accused.
"It was alleged that farmers and land owners of villages in Manesar, Naurangpur and Lakhnaula (also known as Nakhrola) had ancestral land of about 688 acres. They were compelled to sell approximately 400 acres out of the said land to private persons at throwaway prices under the threat of acquisition by the government between August 27, 2004 and August 24, 2007," the ED had said earlier about the case.
The agency had filed a PMLA case in the alleged land scam deal in September 2016 on the basis of a Haryana Police FIR.
It has been alleged that initially, the Haryana government issued a notification under the Land Acquisition Act for acquiring land measuring about 912 acres for setting up an industrial model township.
After this, all the plots had allegedly been grabbed from land owners by private builders at meagre rates.
It was also alleged that an order was then passed by the competent authority, which is the Director of Industries, on August 24, 2007, releasing this land from the acquisition process in violation of the government policy, in favour of the builders, their companies and agents, instead of the original land owners.
The probe agencies found that in this manner, land measuring about 400 acres, the market value of which at that time was above Rs 4 crore per acre, was allegedly purchased by the private builders and others from the land owners for only about Rs 100 crore.
The ED has attached properties worth Rs 42.19 crore in this case in the past.
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