Maharashtra Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde’s Shiv Sena has found itself in a spot after one of his staunch supporters, who was also the mayor of Jalgaon, was arrested along with others for allegedly running a fake call centre to defraud foreigners.
The fake call centre in Jalgaon was being run from a farmhouse, L K Farm, owned by former Jalgaon mayor Lalit Kolhe.
“On September 28, we raided a call centre during morning hours and arrested four people, including the former mayor. They have been remanded in police custody by a local court,” Maheshwar Reddy, Superintendent of Police, Jalgaon, told The Indian Express on Wednesday.
Reddy said the police had seized 32 laptops and eight mobile phones from the fake call centre.
”We were told that the call centre was started some 15-20 days back,” he said, adding that they were yet to find out if the arrested people had duped anyone. The police suspect 20-25 others working in Mumbai were also part of the fake call centre.
When the accused were produced in court, Lalit Kolhe’s advocate argued that he was not involved in the matter and that he had only rented his premises out to the tenants.
Lalit Kolhe, considered a political heavyweight in Jalgaon, was first in the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena and fought the Assembly elections in 2009 and 2014 on MNS tickets. In 2017, he was elected mayor of Jalgaon. Before that, he had served as the deputy mayor of the city. In 2018, he was associated with the BJP.
When contacted, his wife Sarita Mali, who is also the president of the Shiv Sena’s women’s wing in Jalgaon, said, ”My husband Lalit Kolhe had only rented out the farmhouse premises when some people approached him. My husband’s mistake was that he did not verify the antecedents of the people to whom the farmhouse was rented out. He is in no way involved in what was going on inside the rented premises.”
Mali said her husband was not arrested from the farmhouse. ”The police had called him to the police station. He went to the police station in his own vehicle, where the police arrested him. We will fight the case in court. My husband has not done anything wrong,” she said.
Asked whether Kolhe’s family had sought the help of Shinde, Mali replied in the negative. ”We did not seek any help from Eknath Shinde. My husband does not hold any post in the Shiv Sena, but he has been a supporter of Eknath Shinde since the day he went to Surat and Guhawati. My husband was earlier in the MNS and the BJP,” she said.
