The arrest is seen as a part of ED’s investigation under money laundering laws after demonetization on November 8.
Profile of the controversial real estate developer:
- Reports say Lodha has number of stakes in mining, finance, consultancy and restaurant firms.
- He was known as 'Extra floors Lodha' or 'Fiddler on the roof'. He used to add extra floors to an existing property. The Fiddler would approach owners of houses with an offer to buy the roof rights and build additional residential or office space. The task of ensuring that the entire deal was legal Lodha took upon himself, the source said.
- Coming from a family of moneylenders from Sujangarh in Rajasthan’s Churu district, Lodha’s reputation grew in the real estate business as someone who got things done without falling on the wrong side of the law. Well-known city industrialists tapped him, too.
- It was said that Lodha, who shed his small-time builder label to shoot into prominence after the Left Front came to power in 1977, was close to a powerful minister of the time.
- Lodha allegedly was tasked by underworld don Dawood Ibrahim to threaten Peerless Chairman and Managing Director P C Sen to sell his majority stake in the firm to Lodha.
- Lodha’s name cropped up in the Kolkata's Stephen Court fire case in 2010, where 43 people died.
- His daughter was married in a high-profile wedding that was attended by several politicians.
They said he was first intercepted by its sleuths at the Mumbai airport yesterday, based on a look out circular, while he was reportedly trying to fly out.
They said the agency arrested him "in connection with conversion of more than Rs 25 crore of old notes to new notes in Shekhar Reddy and Rohit Tandon cases."
ED will produce Lodha in a court here to obtain his further custody under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
While the Reddy case pertains to Chennai where the Income Tax department has made the biggest detection of unaccounted income of over Rs 142 crore, the Delhi Police and the I-T seized Rs 13.5 crore from a law firm here. The firm belongs to lawyer Rohit Tandon.
Reddy was yesterday arrested by the CBI.
Officials said the multiple agencies working on these two high-profile cases, involving high ranking individuals, are joining dots of the investigations to prepare a water tight case against those who have either hoarded or generated black funds in the wake of the currency scrap of November 8 by the government.
(With additional information from PTI and The Telegraph, Calcutta)