Economic Offences Wing (EOW) in Mumbai has reportedly booked Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty Kundra, her entrepreneur husband Raj Kundra, and another person for allegedly cheating a businessman for a little over Rs 60 crore. Following the news, Prashant Patil, advocate for Shetty and Kundra, rubbished the claims, stating that his clients “deny all the allegations” and that there was “no criminality involved.”
According to ground reports, the EOW case in connection with a loan-cum-investment deal involving the Kundra’s now-defunct company Best Deal TV Pvt Ltd, which led to the alleged defrauding of Rs 60.48 crore from Mumbai-based businessman Deepak Kothari.
The alleged case was first registered at the Juhu police station against the actor and her husband under BNS sections of cheating and forgery, but it was later transferred to the EOW since the alleged amount in question exceeded Rs 10 crore, media reports revealed.
According to the documents viewed by The Times of India, the FIR against the Kundras followed the enquiry into the complaint filed by 60-year-old Kothari, a Juhu resident and the director of the NBFC Lotus Capital Financial Services, filed through advocates Yusuf Iqbal and Zain Shroff.
Kothari alleged that a person named Rajesh Arya introduced him to the actor-businessman couple, who at the time held 87.6 per cent stake in home shopping and online retail platform Best Deal TV Pvt Ltd. According to the complaint, the accused allegedly asked Kothari for a loan of Rs 75 crore at 12 per cent interest. Later, they asked him to route the funds as an “investment” in a bid to avoid higher taxes, which Kothari did in tranches. The businessman alleged that he transferred Rs 31.95 crore in April 2015 under a share subscription agreement, and another Rs 28.53 crore under a supplementary agreement in Sept 2015.
According to the complaint, Kothari later discovered that Best Deal TV Pvt Ltd went through insolvency proceedings due to defaulting on another agreement in 2017. By then, Shetty had allegedly resigned as director. Since then, Kothari allegedly attempted to recover the money but failed.
However, the showbiz couple maintained that the investment was “purely in the nature of an equity investment.”
The legal counsel of Shetty and Kundra provided a statement rebutting the allegations:
“My clients have been informed by a certain segment of electronic and print media that there is an alleged case registered against my clients at the Economic Offence Wing, Mumbai. At the outset, my clients deny all the allegations against [them], which are purely civil in nature and have been adjudicated by the NCLT Mumbai on [October 4 2024].”
“This is an old transaction, wherein the company went into financial distress and eventually got entangled in a long legal battle at the NCLT. There is no criminality involved, and our auditors have submitted all the necessary supporting documents from time to time, as requested by the EOW, including detailed cash flow statements.”
“The company has already received a liquidation order, which has also been placed before the police department. The concerned Charter accounts have visited the police station for last one year for more than 15 times with all the evidence supporting the claims of my clients. This is nothing but a baseless and malicious case aimed at maligning our clients, and appropriate action is being initiated from our side against the perpetrators,” added Patil.
