A law firm owner whose house was raided by the Crime Branch and Income Tax officials on Saturday night dodged police and went underground after he received an SOS alert on his mobile phone about the raid and watched it 'live' in safety from afar.

Rohit Tandon, who is the founder of T&T law, has an office space at his home in Greater Kailash-I and has equipped it with top of the line CCTV cameras and security features that alerted him about the raid, police said. Police found Rs 13.65 crore in cash from his office-cum-residence, of which Rs 2.62 crore was in Rs 2,000 notes that were introduced after demonetisation.

According to police, if anybody switches on any electrical appliance at Tandon's home, he gets a notification on his phone. Sensing that something is wrong on receiving the alert around 10.30pm on Saturday, he switched to the monitoring feature and watched the raid on his phone. Ravindra Yadav, Joint CP (Crime Branch), said Tandon has gone underground since the raid and Income Tax officials are conducting an inquiry into the source of the money.

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Tandon's house was also raided on October 6 this year. At that time, he had declared an undisclosed income of Rs 125 crore to the I-T department. Yadav said that police had been keeping a close watch on Tandon over the last couple of months and conducted the raid after they received a tip-off about a huge consignment of new notes reaching his house. "We received information that Tandon is hoarding a pile of cash illegally and is indulging in transactions with old and new currency notes.

CRORES UNEARTHED IN NEW CURRENCY

Accordingly, a round the clock watch was kept on his activities by the crime branch, especially at his house in Greater Kailash," said the joint commissioner. "From the premises, new and old currency notes were recovered to the tune of Rs 13.65 crore, of which Rs 2.62 crore was found in newly introduced notes of Rs 2,000.

Apart from this, Rs 7.70 crore was in denomination of Rs 1000 and Rs 3.06 crore was in smaller currency notes of Rs 100 and Rs 50," Yadav added. The cash, which had been stashed in luggage bags, wall cabinets and boxes, has been handed over to the Income Tax Department for a probe. According to sources, it was learnt that Tandon had connections in the political sphere, but his office was raided following strict directions from the Prime Minister's Office that anybody hoarding black money should not be spared.

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The crime branch is also scanning the list of his clients as it includes an arms dealer, who is now out on bail, and Gautam Khaitan, who was arrested for his role in the Augusta Westland scam. Tandon, who first came to the limelight when he bought a bungalow in central Delhi for Rs 100 crore in July 2014, is well-networked in legal circles.

According to police, Tandon had brought the property in Jor Bagh via a special purpose company called Devlin Corp, from the Ruia family, which promotes the Essar group. Sources in the I-T department said their search threw up documents about several other properties of the lawyer, besides some investments in shell companies.

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Tandon is also the founder of Zeus Law Associates, which he set up around 2005 and exited around February 2014 to start T&T, leaving his brother-in-law Sunil Tyagi and partner Vivek Kohli in charge of Zeus.

Tandon had said back then when interviewed that the exit from the firm was "extremely amicable" and that he planned to open offices for T&T in Dubai and Chandigarh.

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