The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday said it has attached assets worth Rs 98 crore, including a bungalow in Pune and equity shares, of actor Shilpa Shetty and her husband Raj Kundra as part of a money laundering investigation.
The case pertains to cheating of investor funds through use of Bitcoins.
The federal agency said in a statement that the attached properties include residential flat in Juhu (Mumbai) presently in the name of Shetty and residential bungalow in Pune and equity shares in the name of Kundra.
A provisional attachment order has been issued under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) to attach these properties worth Rs 97.79 crore, it added.
The money laundering case originated from FIRs filed by the Maharashtra Police and Delhi Police against a company named Variable Tech Pte Ltd, along with Late Amit Bhardwaj, Ajay Bhardwaj, Vivek Bhardwaj, Simpy Bhardwaj, Mahender Bhardwaj, and several agents. They allegedly collected huge amounts of funds in the form of Bitcoins (worth Rs 6,600 crore in 2017) from the gullible public with false promises of a 10 per cent per month return in the form of Bitcoins.
“The collected Bitcoins were supposed to be utilised for Bitcoin mining and investors were supposed to get huge returns in crypto assets. But the promoters cheated the investors and have been concealing the ill-gotten Bitcoins in obscure online wallets,” ED said in a statement.
Kundra purportedly received 285 Bitcoins from the mastermind and promoter of Gain Bitcoin Ponzi schemes, Amit Bhardwaj, for setting up a Bitcoin mining farm in Ukraine. He still has the Bitcoins with him, currently valued at more than Rs 150 crore.
In 2021, Kundra spent two months in Mumbai’s Arthur Road jail in connection with a pornography case. He was granted bail in September 2021 by a metropolitan magistrate’s court in Mumbai.