BIZARRE BITCOIN BRIBE ROW A DAY AFTER CASH FOR VOTE DRAMA

PUNE/MUMBAI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday conducted searches at the Raipur (Chhattisgarh)-based premises of an audit firm employee, Gaurav Mehta, as part of its ongoing money laundering investigation into an alleged scam involving a ₹6,606 crore bitcoin-based Ponzi scheme operated by Singaporebased company Variable Tech Pte Ltd.

- Yogesh Joshi and Abhishek Sharan

Mehta's name had surfaced in audio tapes circulated on Tuesday night that sought to implicate NCP (SP) leader Supriya Sule and the Congress's Nana Patole in a scam to encash bitcoins for election-related expenses. The development came a day after BJP leader Vinod Tawde was embroiled in an alleged cash-for-votes controversy.

Experts have since debunked the audio tapes and called them Al-generated.

On Wednesday, both Patole and Supriya Sule denied that it was them on the tapes. Sule also sent a defamation notice to BJP spokesperson Sudhanshu Trivedi and former IPS officer Ravindranath Patil and lodged a complaint with the Election Commission.

A day prior to the assembly elections in Maharashtra, former cop Patil told the media in Pune that former police commissioner of the city Amitabh Gupta and then deputy commissioner of police at Cyber cell, Bhagyashri Navtake, were involved in misappropriation of bitcoins in a case they were investigating and which were now being used by Sule and Patole for the Maharashtra polls.

In 2018, a special investigation team of the Pune police's Economic Offences Wing (EOW)