New Delhi: Adding more fuel to the media buzz about links of top politicians and Bollywood stars to Hassan Ali — the key accused in the Pune money-laundering scam — a former BJP MP on Tuesday alleged that Ali is actually a frontman for two "'powerful Union ministers".
Former BJP MP Kirit Somaiya claims Ali had extended his services to two "powerful Union ministers" from Maharashtra and a few other ministers and that most of the transactions that he executed had occurred during the last three years.
Ali's huge unaccounted assets were detected during an income-tax raid at his residence in Pune last week.
Somaiya told a press conference in Mumbai that these ministers had invested crores of rupees via the Mauritius route through participatory notes in the capital market and the commodity exchange.
Both these ministers are known to Mumbai's business and broker communities as ''major players'' in these markets. One of them is a major investor in the commodity exchange and the other in the stock exchange, he alleged.
Somaiya claimed that the Prime Minister's Office, the Finance Ministry and the Intelligence Bureau were alerted about the deals nine months ago.
Ali's name had cropped up during the Income Tax Department's inquiry and raids on Tapadias of Kolkata and the department had kept a watch on him ever since, Somaiya claimed.
(With agency inputs)
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