ED raids properties, firm of man named in Panama Papers

The ED began the investigation under the provisions Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), based on the Panama Papers leak, which alleged Patil was involved in an undisclosed Rs 66.35 crore credit to offshore entities.

The premises covered include the residential properties of Patil and the office premises of Shree Parvathi Tex (India) Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru, where he is one of the directors, along with his family members.

The searches revealed that Patil had invested in various companies in Dubai, Tanzania and the British Virgin Islands. He held bank accounts in Dubai and Tanzania, they showed.

During the search, several documents related to overseas investment made by Patil were recovered and seized. Further investigation was in progress, the ED said.

Patil runs a sugar export company and is also involved with energy, aviation, textile, education and Internet firms run by the Shivashankarappa family. According to Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca records, Patil and two associates, Sanjay Nadgouda and Shashank Angadi, set up an offshore firm called Elgenburg Ltd in the British Virgin Islands with an initial shareholding of 50,000 shares, with Patil holding 22,500 of them.

The records also show a commercial complex owned by the Shivashankarappa family in Bengaluru as Patil’s address in India.

When contacted, Patil said: “The company was created in 2007 as a buyer for issuing letters of credit in Europe. We were trading in agricultural commodities. We did one deal but suffered losses of Rs 1 crore so we shut it down the same year.”

The Panama Papers is an investigation of a stockpile of records from Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca by Washington-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in 2016, in which the Indian Express was a part of, and it named several world leaders and celebrities, including over 500 Indians, who allegedly stashed away money abroad in offshore companies.