Khanani and Kalia International Director Javed Khanani allegedly committed suicide in Karachi on Sunday.
According to a private news channel, Khanani reportedly died after falling from the under construction building in Muhammad Ali Society. He was rushed to the Liaquat National Hospital where doctors pronounced him dead.
According to police, this case is a suicide attempt. SSP East Faisal Chachar said that more details will be highlighted after the post-mortem report.
Khanani was alone and on a routine visit to the construction site, the police spokesman said, adding that his business partners were at a nearby office when the incident happened.
The spokesman said that he was taken to a private hospital by one of his partners where his family reached after hearing about the incident. The family immediately took the body from the hospital without fulfilling any police/medico-legal formalities.
“So far they are not willing as they are claiming it a suicide/accidental incident,” the spokesman said.
He further said several labourers were taken to the police station for interrogation from the incident site. “So far no CCTV/eyewitness has been accessible,” he added.
The Federal Investigation (FIA) first rounded up Javed and Munaf Kalia in 2008 after a complaint was filed against one of their offices in Punjab, which led to a discovery of a parallel money transfer system being illegally operated by their firm for purposes of transferring money out of the country.
Several cases were filed against the duo in Karachi, Lahore and Abbottabad for running illegal hundi operations.
Javed was one of the directors of money exchange firm Khanani and Kalia International, and was held by FIA in 2014 on charges of transferring foreign currency worth Rs140 million out of Pakistan.
The incident came less than a month after Javed’s brother Altaf Khanani pleaded guilty to charges of money laundering before a US court and was awarded 20-year imprisonment with a fine of $250,000.
Before being implicated, Khanani and Kalia was one of the largest currency exchange companies in the country, founded in 1983 by Hanif Kalia.