Dilip Chhabria, one of India’s most prominent car designers and the owner of DC Motors has been booked by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) (India) today on charges of money laundering. Yesterday, on 28th July, Thursday, the ED conducted as many as 6 raids on locations owned by the company.
The Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Mumbai Police and the CIU unit have both registered a case against Dilip Chhabria, which is the basis for the money laundering case that has been brought against him.
This isn’t the first time Chhabria has been arrested. He was earlier apprehended in December 2020 by the Mumbai Police’s crime branch for acquiring multiple loans in a fraudulent manner. It was claimed that his business pretended to be customers planning to buy certain DC sports cars in order to secure loans from different non-banking financial institutions (NBFC). The company was overdue on its payments. Chhabria was indicted with exploiting the documentation his clients gave at the time of purchasing their cars to obtain a Rs 42 lakh loan for each automobile, and then defaulting on the loan. The case was discovered after the crime branch unit of the Mumbai police received information about a 2 seater DC Avanti sports vehicle entering at the Trident Hotel in Nariman Point on December 18 with a fake license plate.
Additionally, he is indicted with utilizing the exact same chassis and engine numbers for his DC Avanti vehicles while simultaneously taking out additional loans under that same chassis and engine number. The comedian Kapil Sharma also accused Chhabria of defrauding him of millions of dollars by promising to create his vanity vehicle. NBFCs provided the finance for the automobiles, according to officials, who alleged Dilip Chhabria and his friends were running a multi-crore scam while operating under the Avanti Automobile name.
Last year, Chhabria claimed that Sachin Vaze, the CIU director at the time, helped his colleague and partner implicate him in the case. In conjunction with the probe into the Antilla bomb scare last year, Vaze was detained. In 1993, Dilip Chhabria Design was established with the main objective of offering design and prototyping services to the Indian automobile sector as well as customized products to specific customers. Chhabria has a distinguished career in the realm of car engineering, and in 2016, he introduced the DC Avanti, widely regarded as India’s first sports vehicle.