who had created fake invoices for business deals worth over Rs 100 crore in the last three years, has landed in the net of the Directorate General of GST (Intelligence), Bengaluru unit.
After a six-month-long hunt, the team nabbed Piyush Kumar Kothari aka Piyush Jain, 33, from a house in Binnypet on Saturday.
Officials said he was a seasonal fraudster living the high life in Bengaluru, spending money on expensive cars and fancy homes. He is in judicial custody now. “Piyush’s name came up when we were probing the Rs 230-crore tax fraud case. Scrap dealer Haneef Mohammed of Khwaja Enterprises was nabbed for accepting fake invoices to evade GST. Probe revealed that Piyush was the kingpin in getting fake invoices mainly for scrap dealers and accepting kickbacks worth crores from Bengaluru businessmen,” said an officer.
While the associated fraudsters were nabbed by the team, Piyush managed to give investigators the slip by frequently changing homes. “He used PAN and Aadhaar details of poor individuals from his village in Rajasthan and created fake companies in their names. He produced invoices through them for bogus services to the tune of Rs 100 crore for businessmen and managed to evade Rs 20.6 crore in taxes,” another officer said.
On Friday, the team got input that Piyush was at Binnypet and reached there in the early hours of Saturday. “He had hidden 223 grams of ganja and an iPhone inside a false ceiling of the bathroom. We found several evidence connected to the tax credit fraud and hawala dealings for which he used his driver. He refused to open the iPhone,” he added. A Mini Cooper and a top-end Jaguar were also found in his possession. ( TOI )
