Liquor baron Ponty Chadha and his elder brother Hardeep were killed and a security guard was injured in a firing at a Delhi farmhouse on Saturday.
TV reports suggest that after an altercation, Hardeep fired at Ponty and killed him. Ponty’s guard then fired at Hardeep who returned fire. The entire incident reportedly took place in the garden of the farmhouse.
“Lot of problems were there between Ponty and his brother Hardeep over property settlement,” Hardeep’s lawyer told TV channels.
Police said that the brothers had called a meeting to resolve disputes related to property issues.
First reports said that Chadha’s brother, Hardeep, was killed after an unknown assailant opened fire at the family’s farmhouse in Chhatarpur.
The incident happened between 1:00pm and 1:30pm.
Reports said that the police was questioning a guard who was also injured in the firing.
The injured have been admitted to Vasant Kunj’s Fortis hospital.
Chadha’s business empire, the Wave Group, is conservatively valued at Rs. 6,000 crore. It encompasses distilleries, multiplexes (Wave Cinemas), sugar and paper mills, real estate, poultry and films (he produced the 2005 Sunny Deol starrer Jo Bole So Nihaal).
Chadha’s brothers, sons and a grandson run parts of the empire and he rarely appears before the media.
In 2005, during the government of Mulayam Singh, Chadha won statewide contracts to supply ready to eat food for poor, underweight or otherwise malnourished children under the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS).
Chadha’s business interests didn’t suffer when Singh’s rival, Mayawati, came to power in Uttar Pradesh.
Chadha’s company, Great Value Foods, retained the nutrition contracts, and in 2009, he gained an unprecedented monopoly over the state’s wholesale liquor trade.
Chadha’s companies have been probed by Income Tax authorities several times but he has never suffered legal setbacks.
After his properties in 25 locations in Delhi, NCR and Uttar Pradesh were raided in February this year, Chadha reported ‘undisclosed income’ of Rs. 175 crore and paid Rs. 54 crore as tax to the Income Tax department.
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