The management of the well-known city club Bowring Institute discovered six bags filled with ₹3.9 crore in ₹2,000 notes, diamond jewellery, and 650 gm of gold biscuits valued at ₹7.8 crore, two luxury watches, and documents pertaining to real estate deals worth several hundred crores from three lockers in their badminton court. The bags were discovered on Thursday while the management was breaking open lockers of members who had failed to respond to a registration drive.
Hours after the Income Tax Department launched a probe on Friday, a permanent member of the club, Avinash Amarlal Kukreja, 46, — a prominent financier in the city’s real estate sector — came forward and admitted to owning the seized haul. While I-T officials brought him in for questioning, other teams raided property linked to him in Bengaluru (including a tyre showroom) and Mysuru. Search and seizure operations would continue on Sunday, and a case had been filed, said I-T officials.
The club’s managing committee had issued notices to all its 5,182 members to register with them if they held any of the 672 lockers on the institute premises. This was done after the monthly locker rent was hiked from ₹5 to ₹50, said H.S. Srikanth, honorary secretary, Bowring Institute, at a press conference on Saturday.
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“We had issued multiple notices to all members starting from February 2018, through e-mail and SMSs apart from notices pasted on the institute premises. Following the last notice in July first week, we began breaking open 126 lockers for which nobody had come forward to register and in the process we found six heavy bags in locker numbers 69, 71 and 78, in which we later found cash, diamonds, and documents. The lockers were not registered in anyone’s name and hence we could not identify the owner till he turned up himself,” said Mr. Srikanth.
The process of breaking the lockers had been video recorded as a safeguard. When the bags were discovered, the management first alerted the local police and later informed I-T and Enforcement Directorate officials.
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Mr. Srikanth said that while I-T officials were conducting a probe on the institute’s premises, a man came into his chamber and claimed ownership of the contents. “Avinash introduced himself as a permanent member of the club since 1993 and said he had been using these three lockers without authorisation for the past four years. He was not a regular at the club, but his mother is. She plays cards every evening,” he added.
The managing committee of the institute will meet on Monday to initiate action against the financier, and will be installing CCTV cameras at the locker rooms.