The Bengaluru Zonal Office of the Enforcement Directorate (ED) Tuesday said 21 kg of gold bullion, besides silver bars and gold jewellery, worth a total of around Rs 24 crore, were seized from Karnataka Congress MLA K C Veerendra Puppy and others. The seizures were made in connection with its probe into a case pertaining to cheating people through illegal online and offline betting.
The agency stated that the raids were carried out on Saturday under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). “With this, the cumulative seizure of Proceeds of Crime (POC) in this case has crossed Rs 100 crore as on date,” an ED officer said.
“During the searches, 24-carat gold bullion weighing 21.43 kg, 11 units of gold-coated silver bars weighing 10.985 kg and gold jewellery around 1 kg (approximately), valued at about Rs 24 crore, were seized,” the officer said.
The Congress MLA from the Chitradurga Assembly segment was arrested in August over illegal online and offline betting and money laundering. As per an ED statement issued at the time, he operates casinos in Sri Lanka, Nepal and Georgia under other names. “We got profit-sharing Excel sheets…for casinos outside the country. (They are) not in books at all but openly declared on his website Puppy’s World.” The agency, however, claimed that it has now been taken down.
The central agency has, meanwhile, stated that the money collected from betting sites like King567, Raja567, and Lion567 – allegedly operated by Puppy and his associates – “through a single gateway alone is more than Rs 2,000 crore in a short span of time”.
It was also revealed that several gateways have been used for routing the payments collected through these websites.
The agency’s investigation has indicated that Puppy, his family members, and associates have booked several international travel tickets worth crores of rupees, financed through a network of mule accounts linked to proceeds from online betting websites. The evidence suggests that the funds used for these high-value transactions were diverted from illicit online activities and funnelled through multiple intermediary accounts to obscure their origin, according to the probe agency.