NEW DELHI, Nov 13: Customs officials seized 61 kg of gold worth ₹ 32 crores in separate operations at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport in Mumbai and arrested seven travellers, five men, and two women on Friday, officials disclosed on Sunday.
It was the highest value seizure by the department at the airport in a single day. In the first operation, four Indians returning from Tanzania were found carrying 1 kg gold bars, which were concealed in specially-designed belts with multiple pockets, the official said.
Officials recovered 53 kg of UAE-made gold bars, worth ₹ 28.17 crore, from the belts that the passengers had worn around their torso, he said. The belts were handed over to the travellers by a Sudanese national at Doha airport during the transit time, the official said. The four travellers were arrested and remanded to 14 days of judicial custody by a court, he said.
Similarly, customs officials seized 8 kg of gold valued at ₹ 3.88 crore from three passengers who had arrived from Dubai, he said. The trio, including two women, were carrying gold dust in wax form, he said. The gold was ingeniously concealed in the waistline of the jeans the travellers had worn, the official said. One of the women was is in her late 60s and was in a wheelchair, he said, adding that the trio were arrested and remanded to judicial custody.
Meanwhile, Indian-origin Nishad Singh is under scrutiny for financial practices that caused the stunning collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, which is now staring at bankruptcy. He, along with 9 others, lived with FTX founder.
Nishad Singh had joined Alameda Research, FTX’s sister organisation which is at the centre of the controversy, in December 2017. Before this, he worked as a software engineer at Facebook for close to five months. His LinkedIn profile says he worked on machine learning at the social media giant.
At Alameda Research, he was Director of Engineering for 17 months. He then moved to the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in April 2019, and has been there in the same top engineering post since.
Nishad Singh was in the inner circle of 30-year-old founder of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried. “Gary (Chief Technology Officer Gary Wang), Nishad and Sam control the code, the exchange’s matching engine, and funds,” sources said. “If they moved them around or input their own numbers, I’m not sure who would notice,” they said.
According to reports, Sam Bankman-Fried had secretly transferred $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to Alameda. Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research, told employees in a video meeting on Wednesday that she, Sam Bankman-Fried, and two other executives, Nishad Singh and Gary Wang, were aware of the decision to move customer funds to Alameda, reports said.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he studied at Crystal Springs Uplands School in California and graduated summa cum laude from the University of California, Berkeley with a bachelor degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 2017.
(Manas Dasgupta)