Enforcement Directorate carried out multiple raids to shut down Gujarat's liquor mafia.
A multi-crore enterprise to smuggle alcohol into dry Gujarat from the centrally-administered Daman district has been busted by the Enforcement Directorate. Ramesh Patel, alleged to be the couple behind the racket, is on the run. But the agency has seized bottles worth over 2.5 crores in his warehouses and found papers that suggest he had recently smuggled worth 7 crores into the state.
They have also seized lakhs of rupees in cash and three imported cars, Land Rover Evoque, Audi Q3 and Audi A8L, valued at 2 crores. In the last three years alone, ED officials said, he had made bank deposits of 223.47 crore in cash in his account.
Called Gujarat's liquor mafia don by the Enforcement Directorate, Mr Patel's business model is said to be relatively simple. He had four licenses to stock and sell liquor in Daman, a district in the adjoining Union Territory of Daman and Diu that was a Portuguese colony till 1961. But instead of just selling the liquor in Daman, Patel preferred selling the liquor to bootleggers in Gujarat for a premium. They could place their orders on a WhatsApp number. And his men would deliver, without fail.
The liquor would be smuggled into Gujarat in big transport vehicle, usually a trailer truck with a shipping container loaded on it. It would cross the Daman-Gujarat border on the basis of forged invoices of genuine manufacturing entities.
Gujarat has been a dry state, right from the 1960s when the state was carved out of Mumbai. It had continued with the prohibition policy, emulated later by some other states including Nagaland and Bihar.