Metro Shoes8217; US connection

According to the police, among the major accused in the scam, Metro Shoes was the only company which had ingeniously added the hawala angle to the transactions. The company received cash gifts to the tune of over a million US dollars equivalent to Rs 3.5 crore, in parts, over a period of two years, between 1995-1996.

The money was transmitted through telegraphic transfers through Mumbai branches of Citibank and Bank of America. The officers have seized bank documents and statements of accounts from Tejani8217;s relatives and the banks8217; headquarters in the US.

Joint Commissioner of Police crime Ranjit Singh Sharma, told Express Newsline: 8220;We have managed to accomplish all that was mentioned in the letter rogatory.8221; Sharma joined Padsalgikar and Mahadik in the first week of October. The team returned on October 10.

The police team located the origins and sources of million-dollar gifts to Metro Shoes in US though, they are yet to ascertain the facts about details of the hawala operations of the company and such other ways of siphoning money abroad.

When contacted, a manager of Metro Shoes said, 8220;What scam? We have repaid all the loans. The police cannot object to gifts. There is no hawala involved. The police talks about 1000-crore scam and chargesheets only for Rs 30-crore hinting at chargesheet in Dawood Shoes8221;.

Among the five main scamsters, shoe companies including Dawood of Sadruddin Daya, Metro of Rafiq Tejani, Highness of Karim Maredias, Milano of Kishore Signapurkar and Citywalk of Abu Asim Azmi, the share of Metro Shoes is the third largest, after, Dawood and Highness. The police marks this over Rs 250 crore.

However, the exact loan component in entire shoe scam aggregates to a maximum of Rs 71 crore, the amount for which the economic offences wing has been chargesheeting the shoe companies. Investigators believe that the inclusion of other extraneous factors like octroi subsidy, sales tax exemption, income-tax evasion and other incentives takes the amount of the scam to a cool Rs 1,000-crore and even more.

The Mumbai police is probing only the loan component of the shoe companies, while other agencies including the income-tax and sales-tax departments and registrar of societies are investigating the other aspects of the scam.

So far, two chargesheets have been filed in the 23-month-old scam, the first of which was filed in July 8217;97 against Dawood Shoes, and the second in September against the Milano Shoes.