Market Defaulter Vivek Nagpal May have Links with BCCI Topguns

Vivek Nagpal, alleged hawala operator close to the President’s secretary, Omita Paul, also has links to BCCI topguns

File image of President Pranab Mukherjee with Omita Paul on the last day in his office as Finance Minister at North Block in New Delhi. (Photo: PTI)

Vivek Nagpal, who disgraced former IPC commissoner Lalit Modi has called a hawala operator and is allegedly associated with President Pranab Mukherjee’s secretary Omita Paul, is believed to have links to several BCCI top-guns and was one of many businessmen whose phone was tapped by a private detective agency which had also targeted Arun Jaitley two years ago.

Investigations into the phone tapping operation by the Delhi Police had revealed that the detective agency, at behest of some unknown persons, had mounted the surveillance on the phones of several politicians, businessmen and bureaucrats who had close links in the BCCI.

In fact, around two years ago, Lalit Modi had named Nagpal as the man who manipulated appointments and elections to the BCCI.

Four years ago, market regulator and watchdog, Securities and Exchange Board of India, imposed a fine of Rs 30 lakh against Padmini Technologies, holding that it “seriously compromised the securities market regulatory framework to the detriment of the investors...Its scrip was suspended in 2002 for penal reasons.” SEBI also said in a report that Padmini Technologies had not “attended to 270 demat requests since 2002” and that non-dematerialisation and delay in materialisation is seriously detrimental to the interests of investors.”

The Enforcement Directorate suspects that Nagpal has invested a great deal of the money he and a few other stock brokers made in the market manipulation nearly 15 years ago in the British Virgin Islands.

Nagpal ran or continues to run a stock broking firm called Padmini Financial Services Limited in which his wife Aarti is also a director. About nine years ago, the husband-wife duo launched another company called Grand Accent Overseas in the Virgin Islands.

In the stock market scandal, Nagpal was closely associated with Ketan Parekh who owns stakes in two firms of the former, Shonkh Technologies, which deals in automobile number plates and smart cards, and Padmini Polymers, later rechristened Padmini Technologies.

In 1997, the Enforcement Directorate unearthed massive over-invoicing of exports linked to another of Nagpal’s firms, Padmini Technologies. The ED discovered that sometime in January 1997, Delhi Customs raided the premises of a Music World in the Noida Export Promotion Zone.

It was found that CD-Roms that were being manufactured at Music World were sold much below the market rate to Padmini Technologies which, in turn, exported the product at a much higher price.

On behalf of Padmini Technologies, a large Gujarat based trading house called Adani Exports would import plastic and other related products, which attract high Customs duties, and sell to itself those very items.

A report of the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence was “categorical” in its findings that the over-invoicing had “resulted in evasion of Customs duties and contravention of various revenue laws of the country.”

Padmini Technologies subsequently had a run-in with the Income Tax department. As the assessee, Padmini Technologies filed tax returns in which it declared that its income as “nil.”