Tapuriah outside the court on Thursday. (PTI)

March 24: The Enforcement Directorate today arrested Calcutta businessman Kashinath Tapuriah after questioning him for three days in Mumbai on the charge of helping Hasan Ali Khan launder money.

Tapuriah, 74, arrested at 2.38am, was produced in the evening before a Mumbai court that sent him to ED custody till March 30.

Hasan Ali, the Pune-based stud farm owner accused of stashing away about Rs 36,000 crore in Swiss bank accounts, is also in ED custody. The directorate has summoned Ali’s chartered accountant, Sunil Shinde, after searching his premises in Pune yesterday.

Tapuriah is the brother of the late Priyamvada Birla, who was chairperson of the Rs 5,000-crore MP Birla Group, and the son-in-law of Haridas Mundhra, who was involved in India’s first big financial scam in the 1950s.

The ED counsel claimed “active participation” between Tapuriah and Ali in stashing black money from India into foreign accounts, adding that the “conspiracy” had “international ramifications”.

After freezing his bank accounts two weeks ago, the ED had summoned Tapuriah to Mumbai for questioning. The ED’s remand application said that searches of his Calcutta home on March 7 had led them to incriminating material including a transfer instruction from Ali’s account to various other accounts, including some opened by Tapuriah.

The ED has alleged that Tapuriah had travelled with Ali to Singapore to open accounts with the Swiss Bank Corporation in Ali’s name. It says Ali had given him the power of attorney and a transaction was done through the account.

Tapuriah’s lawyer pleaded that the ED had summoned the “senior citizen” seven times and that his client had been appearing before the directorate continuously since March 10.

On March 7, a 13-member ED team had searched Tapuriah’s Short Street home for over eight hours and left with some documents and two air tickets. Later, the directorate seized his laptop and cellphone and froze three bank accounts belonging to him and his wife Chandrika, one with a nationalised bank and the other two with private banks.

“Nearly Rs 1 crore is deposited in these three accounts,” a senior ED official had then said. “We have also seized a diary from the flat that contained some names. The same names emerged during Ali’s interrogation.”

Tapuriah’s biggest enterprise was the cable-manufacturing firm Incab Industries Ltd, which he had bought from its British owners in the late 1980s. Sources said he had told the investigators he first came in touch with Hasan Ali while scouting for funds for Incab.

A Calcutta businessman recalled how Incab’s finances suffered under Tapuriah, who was charged with various statutory offences and was arrested once.

“He was ousted from Incab in 1996 when a Malaysian firm bought it with help from financial institutions,” the businessman said.

Tapuriah, a Presidency College graduate, was a director of various Birla companies and a trustee of the MP Birla Foundation and Belle Vue Clinic. But after his relationship with Priyamvada Birla soured in the late 1990s, Tapuriah was asked to resign from all entities owned by the MP Birla Group.