The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday raided the houses and premises of Sanjay Mahajan, who is believed to be a close aide of senior Congress leader and Sonia Gandhi’s close aide: Ahmed Patel. This raid was conducted in connection with a money laundering case which involves the Sandesara Group of companies. This Sandesara group is alleged to have been involved in high value suspicious transactions which amount to as much as Rs 5,383 crore.
As per an ED spokesperson, searches were conducted at Mahajan’s establishments in Mayur Vihar Phase 1 and Babar Road in Delhi. Apart from him, the agency also raided the premises of three other persons namely Ghanshyam Pandey, Lakshmi Chand Gupta and Arvind Gupta.
This isn’t the only time Ahmed Patel has got into trouble due to his supposed associations.
A huge storm was kicked up in Gujarat recently after it was reported that one of the ISIS terrorists who was arrested by Gujarat ATS used to work in a hospital whose patron used to be Ahmed Patel.
Such a connection had resulted in Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani attacking Ahmed Patel by asking as to why should he (Ahmed Patel) not be held responsible. Patel had later dismissed these allegations.
Such strange associations of Ahmed Patel might lead to the speculation as to whether his cons outweigh the pros for the Congress party.
Only recently, the party had thrown all its weight to help Ahmed Patel scrape through with a Rajya Sabha win. It looked like the party might fall short of the required numbers as its Gujarat MLAs continued to quit the party in the run-up these elections.
In order to ensure that they had the required numbers, the party airlifted its remaining MLAs to a resort in Bengaluru. This created a huge loss of goodwill for the party as Gujarat was hit with a flood during this “hostage taking exercise” which meant that the party was attacked with reports like, “Congress MLAs enjoy karaoke night even as flood fury continues in Gujarat”.
