The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday said that they raided nine locations in Maharashtra in connection to a money laundering investigation into the irregularities in tender allocation of the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) scheme at Aurangabad.

The raids were carried out in Aurangabad, Pune and Akola.

The ED initiated investigation on the basis of the FIR registered by Aurangabad Municipal Corporation against firms — Samarath Construction & JV, ndo Global Infrastructure Services, Jaguar Global Services and their respective partners — for forgery and formation of a cartel to illegally win the tender of the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation for constructing 40,000 PMAY houses in the city.

The PMAY scheme was to be implemented at seven plots in Aurangabad and it was found that all the three e-tenders were uploaded from a single IP address.

The FIR was registered after the PMAY regulators identified the anomaly that the winning firm was not at all financially capable of implementing such a big project.

“The ED investigation has also revealed that the three JV firms applied for the e-tender from the same IP address. Tender was allotted to one Samarath Constrcution & JV, but out of the performance Bank Guarantee of Rs 46.24 crore they had deposited BG of only Rs 88.60 lakh. Also, Samarath Construction & JV subverted the due procedure by getting the extension of the initial tender for 19.22 hectares to 120 hectares without a fresh tender process. The amount of government subsidy involved in this scam is to the tune of around Rs 1,000 Crore. Searches were conducted at all the three tender applicants,” the ED said.

It has been learnt that in the case of the two losing e-tender applicants, the major JV partners have completely denied their involvement in the tender process and are claiming forgery of their credentials by the L1 applicant.

The ED has seized various incriminating documents including the note-sheet of the tender file of Aurangabad Municipality from the applicant.

Authorities of the Aurangabad Municipal Corporation are extending their cooperation and are sharing all documents in relation to this tender process.