The notice issued by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Crime Branch to probe allegations against Anil Chandanmal Singhvi and his wife Nishi Singhvi that they happen to be directors of a host of shell companies has taken a new twist recently.

On December 13, the Singh Is reported that the companies under their wing suffered a cyber attack and had crashed. Within two days of reporting their servers crashing, a huge quantity of shares, reportedly 10 lakh shares of Subex, a flagship company, were offloaded by the management.

The corpus of such an extraordinary proportion of shares being offloaded ran into INR 6 crores. Our Sprouts’ Special Investigation Team (SIT) unearthed that this suspicious transaction has resulted in many investors incurring heavy losses. In addition, the offloading needs to be probed, our SIT recommends.

The probe into the shell companies that was initiated at the behest of complainant Bala Vengurlekar had resulted in investigations being conducted by two nodal agencies, namely Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Income Tax (IT) department in addition to local law enforcing authorities, Mumbai’s EOW.

The 7 advisory companies owned by the couple were I Can Investment Advisers Private Limited, Pathfinder Advisors Pvt. Ltd., IIRS Research Foundation, Angha Advisory LLP, Assets Care and Reconstruction Enterprise limited , Kidderpore Holdings Ltd. Foundation For liberal and Management Education. These companies and the transactions of alleged money laundering through other shell companies came under the scanner soon after our SIT team published its findings on the basis of Vengurlekar’s complaint to the EOW.

Vengurlekar has also placed on record that the directors of all these companies constituted only the husband and wife pair as directors. There was no presence of any independent directors in their fold. The social activist demanded that there should be a thorough investigation conducted into this scale of transaction taking place on a single day.

It may be recalled that soon after the EOW issued a probe order, Sprouts carried a full page report on the misuse of shell companies that were aiding and abetting large scale money laundering. Repeated attempts to contact Anil Singhvi failed at the time of going to press.

Subex Limited surrounded by shaddy deals

Singhvi firms engaged in shady deals

Rs 6 crore worth shares off-loaded in a day

ED to probe Singhvi’s shell companies

Singhvis sell INR 6 cr. shares in one day

Singhvis sell high volume of shares in one day

EOW to extend probe on Anil Singhvi’s shell Cos

A single day offload of INR 6 crores is suspicious

Market regulator too might have to step in