In the harsh summer of 2011 yoga guru Baba Ramdev, who had latched on to the India Against Corruption movement, burst into the front seat of politics with his threat to fast unto death against black money. Soon, he became a crowd puller in the anti-corruption movement and friend in need for the opposition BJP.
A couple of years later, the government he agitated against fell, BJP came to power and he went on to become a billionaire known across India for selling goods ranging from toothpaste to herbal medicines and edible oil under the umbrella Patanjali brand.
Away from the glare, Ramdev’s Patanjali has a shadow business. The Collective’s latest investigation shows the Patanjali business empire is also functioning as a dubious real-estate agency buying and selling forested lands in the fragile Aravalli mountain range through a web of shell companies.
These web of shell and obscure companies linked to the Patanjali group, mostly controlled and managed by the renunciate’s younger brother and close business associates, have been buying and selling lands in Mangar, located in Haryana’s Faridabad, for the last decade.
Shell companies can help hide the real beneficiaries of the transactions they undertake and evade taxes. They are used to move illegally earned money through layers of transactions and give them a veneer of legitimacy through banking channels. They are often used by the rich to hide their wealth from citizens and governments.
The Modi government had claimed that in the last three years it has eliminated more than 1.2 lakh such shell companies. But Patanjali’s shell firms weren’t in them.
The Collective did an x-ray of one such shell firm, Patanjali Corrupack Private Limited, to bring to light how Patanjali has been using shell firms to funnel money for real estate business.
We tracked where the money was coming from and how money was being used. Corrupack certainly didn’t use a paisa to do its core business of manufacturing packaging material but used the slush of funds to buy and sell land in Mangar forests.
The Collective’s investigation searched corporate and land records from more than a decade and a half. It helped unravel the ownership and investors of a web of dubious shell companies and connect the dots to the actual buyers of land – the Patanjali empire.
Read on The Collective’s website the first of the two-part investigative series #PatanjaliPapers by my colleagues Shreegireesh Jalihal & Tapasya.