A Delhi court sent I-PAC co-founder and director Vinesh Chandel to ten days of ED custody following his arrest by the Enforcement Directorate in a money laundering case, officials said on Tuesday. In a major action weeks ahead of the West Bengal Assembly Polls, the federal probe agency late Monday evening arrested Chandel after questioning. He is a law graduate from NLIU Bhopal and a 33 per cent shareholder of I-PAC. ED officials said Chandel was arrested in a fresh case filed after taking cognisance of a Delhi Police FIR that involves the Indian PAC Consulting Pvt Ltd (I-PAC). This case is "linked" to the coal scam probe, they said.
I-PAC has been providing political consultancy to the TMC and the West Bengal government since 2021. It has many other political parties as clients. There was no immediate reaction from I-PAC on the latest development. In January, the ED raided the I-PAC office in Kolkata and premise of another director and co-founder, Pratik Jain, as part of its probe into the alleged coal scam case in West Bengal based on a CBI FIR. Late Monday night, Chandel was produced before Additional Sessions Judge (Patiala House Courts) Shefali Barnala Tandon. The court sent him to 10 days of ED custody. Chandel's premises in Delhi, apart from that of another I-PAC co-founder and director, Rishi Raj Singh, in Bengaluru and that of former Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) communications in-charge Vijay Nair in Mumbai, were raided by the ED on April 2 as part of this investigation. The ED said it has come across "multiple" instances of alleged financial irregularities and various modes of "money laundering" by I-PAC, including receipt of accounted and unaccounted funds, receipt of unsecured loans without any business credentials, issuance of bogus bills and invoices, receipt of funds from third parties, and movement of cash through hawala channels, including international hawala. It claimed I-PAC was involved in laundering proceeds of crime of about Rs 50 crore.
According to the pertinent law, directors of a company are liable where the offence has been committed with their consent, connivance or attributable neglect, the ED said. Abhishek Banerjee, the national general secretary of the Trinamool Congress (TMC), in a post on X late Monday night, said Chandel's arrest barely 10 days before the Bengal election, is not just alarming, but shakes the very idea of a level playing field. On January 8, the federal probe agency raided I-Pac office and the Kolkata residence of Pratik Jain in the coal "scam" case. In a quick follow-up, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee landed at the raided location along with state government officials and took away certain crucial documents. The ED said its searches against I-PAC and Jain in Kolkata were "obstructed" by Banerjee, claiming relevant documents and gadgets were forcibly taken away by her and the state administration. The chief minister and the TMC countered these allegations, saying said the ED was attempting to take its election-strategy-related documents from I-PAC premises just before the assembly polls in the state. West Bengal will have a two-phase poll on April 23 and April 29. The ED sought a CBI probe into this "gross abuse of power" by the chief minister from the Supreme Court, which is currently hearing the case. The ED's coal "scam" case stems from a November 2020 FIR of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) that has alleged a multi-crore-rupee coal-pilferage scam related to Eastern Coalfields Limited mines in West Bengal's Kunustoria and Kajora areas, in and around Asansol. The ED said in a statement that a "hawala" operator linked to this alleged coal-smuggling ring had facilitated transactions of tens of crores of rupees to Indian PAC Consulting Private Limited, the registered company of I-PAC.