The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Thursday raided the premises of Haryana Congress MLA Rao Dan Singh and his family as well as a metal fabricating company and its promoters as part of its money laundering probe linked to an alleged Rs 1,392 crore bank loan fraud case.
A law graduate and businessman, Rao Dan Singh is a four-time Congress MLA from the Mahendragarh constituency.
The ED teams raided Singh’s residence, his farmhouse and the premises of a metal fabricating company Allied Strips Limited (ASL) and its promoters, Mohinder Agrawal and Gaurav Agrawal, among others. About 15 locations in Mahendragarh, Bahadurgarh, Rewari, Gurugram, Delhi and Jamshedpur were searched by the ED teams. In its probe, the ED has found that Rao Dan Singh’s family and companies took loan from the ASL that was eventually written off, sources said.
Belonging to the Ahir (OBC) community, Singh, 68, has been a close aide of state Congress stalwart and ex-chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, the Leader of Opposition (LoP) in the state Assembly.
Singh also contested the recent Lok Sabha polls from the Bhiwani-Mahendragarh constituency, but lost to the incumbent BJP MP Dharambir Singh with a margin of 41,510 votes.
In his affidavit submitted to the Election Commission while filing his nomination for the Lok Sabha polls, Singh mentioned that he was not facing any criminal case. He declared his assets to be worth Rs 18.04 crore.
Singh was first elected from Mahendragarh in 2000, when he emerged as a giant-killer by defeating BJP veteran Rambilas Sharma, who had been winning the seat continuously for four terms since 1982.
Singh also trounced Sharma in the 2005 and 2009 polls. However, months after the Narendra Modi-led BJP stormed to power at the Centre, Sharma made a comeback in the state Assembly polls, wresting the Mahendragarh seat from Singh.
In the 2019 polls, Singh bounced back to defeat Sharma again. In the upcoming Assembly polls slated for October this year, Singh is again likely to be fielded by the Congress from his stronghold.
Singh was born at Pahladgarh in Mahendragarh. He got his school and college education in Chandigarh and Jaipur. He did his MA from Panjab University in 1976, then did his LLB from Shri Lal Bahadur Shastri College, Jaipur in 1980 before receiving his MBA degree from University of Rajasthan in 1983.
Singh and his spouse Sandhya are in the business of fuel and automobile service stations in Mahendragarh and Gurgaon. He had also been the Haryana Football Association president in 2012.
In the run-up to the Lok Sabha polls, Singh’s son Akshat came under a scathing attack not only from the ruling BJP but also from the then Congress leader Kiran Choudhry and her daughter Shruti Choudhry. Shruti had won the Bhiwani-Mahendragarh Lok Sabha seat in 2009 on the Congress ticket, but lost in the 2014 and 2019 polls. This time, the Congress fielded Singh from the seat, ignoring Shruti’s claim over it. Recently, both Kiran and Shruti quit the Congress and joined the BJP.
Akshat’s name had cropped up in the ED’s investigations into the Adarsh Credit Co-operative Society scam. Kiran and Shruti had raked it up during the Lok Sabha polls to target Singh’s candidature. However, Akshat had then said that the chargesheet in the case was filed a long time ago and that it was a sub-judice matter in which he had already got bail from a court.
