New Delhi: Bollywood Actor Ranbir Kapoor has been summoned by the Enforcement Directorate on Friday, October 6 in connection with a gaming app case.
Sources said that Ranbir Kapoor is among at least 15 other celebrities who are under the Enforcement Directorate scanner in connection with the online betting case. All these celebrities allegedly had attended the marriage ceremony of one Sourabh Chandrakar, the promoter of the Mahadev betting app in the UAE. Celebrities under the ED radar in this case include Tiger Shroff, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Atif Aslam, Krishna Abhishek, Nushrat Bharucha, Sunny Leone among others.
The lavish wedding ceremony of Chandrakar was attended by several Bollywood celebrities and the financial probe agency had found the details of the payments of hotels and transport details during the searches it carried out last month.
The founders of Mahadev Book app are being probed by police and ED in several states. It is alleged that the Mahadev Books spent around Rs 200 crore on the marriage ceremony programme in Dubai with private jets hired to ferry family members from Nagpur to the UAE. The ED probe also found that celebrities were hired to perform in the marriage. Wedding planners, dancers, decorators, etc., were hired from Mumbai and hawala channels were used to make payments in cash.
The ED said that as per the digital evidence gathered by it, Rs 112 crore was delivered via hawala to an events management company -- R-1 Events Pvt Ltd of Yogesh Popat -- and hotel bookings worth Rs 42 crore were done by paying in cash in AEDs. It also said that during the searches at the premises of Popat, Mithilesh and other linked organisers and evidence relating to receipt of Rs 112 crore hawala money was crystallised.
"Subsequently, searches were conducted on the angadias named by Popat and resulted in seizure of unaccounted cash of Rs 2.37 crore," the ED claimed. Sources said that in the coming days, many celebrities who attended the ceremony of Chandrakar in Dubai will be quizzed by the financial probe agency sleuths. (With agency inputs)
Also read: Mahadev betting case: ED seizes assets worth Rs 417 crore
