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The Enforcement Directorate has attached assets worth Rs 11.86 crore of former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah and others in connection with its money laundering probe linked to alleged financial irregularities in the Jammu and Kashmir Cricket Association, official sources said on Saturday.
They said the agency has issued a provisional attachment order under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act and the attached properties are located in Jammu and Srinagar.
Two immovable assets are residential, one is a commercial property while three other plots of land have also been attached by the Enforcement Directorate, they said.
While the book value of these attached properties is Rs 11.86 crore, their market value is about Rs 60-70 crore, they added.
The 83-year-old National Conference patron has been questioned by the ED in this case a number of times, the last being in October at Srinagar.
Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah on Saturday termed the provisional attachment order of properties belonging to his father by the Enforcement Directorate as “baseless” and wondered how an ancestral property could be seen as proceeds of “crime”.
In a series of tweets, Omar, who is the vice president of the National Conference, said his father, Farooq Abdullah, “is in touch with his lawyers and will fight all these baseless charges in the one place that matters – a court of law”.
He said everyone is presumed to be innocent and is entitled to a fair trial “unlike in the court of the media or the court of BJP managed social media”.
Omar expressed wonder that the properties attached are largely ancestral dating from the 1970s with the most recent one built before 2003.
“There can be no justification for the seizures because they fail the very basic test of having been acquired as the proceeds of the ‘crime’ being investigated,” he said.
He said that his father came to know about the attachment of his properties in the ongoing investigation in to the JKCA matter through media.
“Not surprisingly the media was tipped off regarding the seizure before he had received any official notice or documentation,” he said.
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