I-T sleuths conducted raids at Vaswani’s residence and office in Bhopal. (source: ANI photo) I-T sleuths conducted raids at Vaswani’s residence and office in Bhopal. (source: ANI photo)

Income Tax sleuths on Tuesday carried out searches at the residence and hotels of BJP leader and former chairman of Madhya Pradesh Rajya Sahakari Awas Sangh Sushil Vaswani in Bairagarh on the outskirts of Bhopal. Vaswani was chairman of Mahanagar Cooperative bank for more than a decade while his wife Kiran is the current chairperson of the bank that has several influential persons as directors.

The raids followed reports that the cooperative leader had allegedly laundered money after the demonetization decision on November 8. The leader owns three hotels in the city. He was chairman of the housing cooperative federation for five years and enjoyed minister of state status for five years. During the raids, the leader, however, claimed that no illegal money was found from his house, and described as rumours the talk that a lot of currency and weapons were found.

Bhopal (Madhya Pradesh): IT Department officials conduct raid at the office and residence of BJP leader Sushil Vaswani. More details awaited pic.twitter.com/U8Jwn0exXl — ANI (@ANI_news) December 20, 2016

Earlier in November, BJP’s youth wing secretary from Salem, JVR Arun, was arrested by Tamil Nadu police with bundles of new currency notes worth Rs 20.55 lakh. BJP said that they had removed Arun from organisational responsibilities after his arrest. In another incident, former BJP leader Manish Sharma from West Bengal was also caught with Rs 33 Lakh in Rs 2,000 notes.

More updates to follow

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