ED arrests former promoter Venkatram of DCHL in money laundering case

The Enforcement Directorate has arrested T Venkatram Reddy, a former promoter of the Deccan Chronicle Holdings Limited (DCHL), as part of a money laundering investigation linked to an alleged bank fraud case, official sources said on Tuesday.

Reddy was taken into custody under the Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) by the federal agency's Hyderabad office, they said.

The agency had said in 2020 that its probe found that "the three promoters of DCHL namely P K Iyer, T Venkatram Reddy and T Vinayakravi Reddy hatched a well planned conspiracy and manipulated the balance sheets of the company inflating the profits-advertisement revenue and grossly under-stated the financial liabilities of the company to paint a rosy picture for years to cheat the banks and its shareholders."

The company, at that time, was stated to be under corporate insolvency resolution process.

A resolution plan for only Rs 400 crore has been approved by the NCLT. The total loan fraud committed by DCHL and its promoters is estimated to be at Rs 8,180 crore, the agency had said.

The ED filed a PMLA case against the firm and its promoters in 2015 after studying a CBI FIR registered to investigate the alleged bank loan default.