Kashinath Tapuriah at his home after the raid on Monday. (Bishwarup Dutta)

The alleged black money trail of Pune-based stud farm owner Hasan Ali Khan led the enforcement directorate to city businessman Kashinath Tapuriah’s house on Monday.

The sleuths questioned Tapuriah — the brother of Late Priyamvada Birla, who was chairperson of the Rs 5,000-crore MP Birla Group — and searched his apartment for over eight hours before leaving with some seized documents and two air tickets.

There were similar raids in 13 other cities in connection with the case.

“We came here in connection with our probe into how Khan diverted money to foreign banks…. We have learnt that Khan was in touch with Tapuriah,” said enforcement directorate deputy director Bijay Kumar Mallik, who led the 13-member sleuth team.

Khan has been declared the country’s biggest tax defaulter, with dues more than Rs 50,000 crore. The directorate and other agencies are probing allegations that Khan had illegally channelled around $9 billion into foreign banks.

After the sleuths left his 6 Short Street home (off Park Street) around 5.15pm, an apparently unperturbed Tapuriah said: “I told the officials that I was not in touch with Khan for the past four years. I met him first in Mumbai in 1994, when I asked him to invest in my company. I was facing a financial crisis then and so, asked him to invest. But he turned down my proposal.”

The 74-year-old is the son-in-law of Haridas Mundhra, the chief architect of India’s first big financial scam unearthed in the 1950s.

The biggest of his enterprises was cable-manufacturing firm Incab Industries Ltd, which he had bought from its British owners in the late 1980s. Tapuriah apparently told the sleuths that he first came in touch with Khan while he was scouting for funds for Incab.

A city businessman recalled how the company’s finances suffered under Tapuriah, who was charged with various statutory offences and arrested once. “He was ousted from Incab in 1996 when a Malaysian firm bought it with help from financial institutions,” said the businessman.

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