Rohit Pawar quizzed by ED for 8 hours

“We are fighting for ideology. I want to clarify that those who were scared have ran away in the past. It is not going to happen with us. We are ready for the inevitable struggle that stands in our future,” said Rohit.

On Thursday, Rohit turned up at ED’s south Mumbai office at around 1 pm, accompanied by his wife Kunti, father Rajendra Pawar and cousin sister Revati Sule. His granduncle and NCP chief Sharad Pawar’s wife Pratibha Pawar was at the NCP office nearby.

Prior to visiting the ED office, Rohit had said, “I was served a notice by the ED first time on January 19. But the Economic Offence Wing filed the closure report in the case on January 20. There is nothing to hide as closure report is filed when agencies find no material to probe. Irrespective of that if ED wants to interrogate me and wants documents then I am ready to give it,” said Rohit.

On January 24 when Rohit was quizzed by the agency for nearly 12 hours, Sharad Pawar was present at the party office waiting for him to be released. He was also accompanied by his daughter and Baramati Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule. Both are presently in Delhi for the budget session of Parliament.

The money laundering investigation into Pawar’s firm is related to charges of “diversion” of cash and the deposit of earnest payments by a company that bid on the purchase of an ailing Maharashtra-based cooperative sugar factory Kannad Sahkari Sakhar Karkhana (SSK).

The said factory was taken over by Baramati Agro at Rs 50 crore which is significantly undervalued price and suspected to be result of a manipulated auction under the Maharashtra State Co-operative Bank, the anti-money laundering agency suspects.

The MSCB scam case relates to loans given to sugar factories allegedly without following procedure by officials of the MSCB even after they turned into Non-Performing Assets and their subsequent sale to kin of the accused below market value.

The probe in the case was initiated after a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed before the Bombay High Court into the alleged irregularities at the bank. An FIR was first registered by the Economic Offences Wing and the ED too filed a case of alleged money laundering in 2019.

Earlier, in April last year the central agency had filed its first chargesheet in the case against three — Guru Commodity Services Pvt Ltd, Jarandeshwar Sugar Mills Pvt Ltd and chartered accountant Yogesh Bagrecha. The ED had alleged links of deputy CM Ajit Pawar — uncle of Rohit Pawar — and his wife to the two companies but they were not named then.

In August ED filed two supplementary chargesheets in connection with the MSCB case naming 11 more persons as accused including NCP Sharad Pawar-led faction’s MLA Prajakt Tanpure. The others named in the chargesheet include former NCP MLA Prasad Tanpure, Eknath Shinde-led Shiv Sena former MLA Arjun Khotkar and former Congress minister Ranjeet Deshmukh.