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| Photo Credit: ANI
The Directorate of Enforcement (ED) on Thursday (April 17, 2025) stoutly denied the allegation made by the Tamil Nadu government and the Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) that TASMAC officials were subjected to human rights violations during the ED’s search and seizure operation conducted at its headquarters in Chennai between March 6 and 8, 2025.
Appearing before a Division Bench of Justices S.M. Subramaniam and K. Rajasekar, Additional Solicitor General S.V. Raju, assisted by ED Special Public Prosecutor N. Ramesh, read out the contents of the panchanamas recorded during the search. He highlighted the portions where it was recorded that the TASMAC officials were given adequate rest, and that women employees were allowed to go home during the night hours.
He said those panchanamas had been signed by the TASMAC officials who had not raised any complaint of human rights violation whatsoever until the filing of the present batch of three writ petitions — one by the State government and two by TASMAC — to declare the search and seizure operation illegal and to restrain the ED from ‘harassing’ the officials in the guise of inquiry.
Mr. Raju said the complaints regarding human rights violations appear to have been made solely at the instance of some lawyers in order to maintain the present writ petitions. Stating that the Managing Director of TASMAC S. Visakan was an Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, the ASG said, no IAS officer would have kept quiet if the ED officials had harassed or exerted any kind of force.
The law officer asserted that the entire search and seizure operation was conducted in a peaceful manner and that the data from the mobile phones as well as email accounts of the top officials of TASMAC were copied to hard drives, after recording their hash values, in the presence of those officials and with the assistance of technical experts. “It was not as if the data was taken clandestinely,” he said.
On his part, Advocate General P.S. Raman pointed out that Section 17 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of 2002 mandates certain pre-requisites to be followed before conducting a search. It requires ED officials to record in writing the ‘reasons to believe’ that the person to be searched had committed an act of money laundering or was in possession of proceeds of crime and so on.
Section 17(2) of the Act requires the ED officials to forward the ‘reasons to believe’ recorded in writing to the adjudicating authority under PMLA “immediately” after the search. “However, in the present case, the ‘reasons to believe’ have been sent to the adjudicating authority only on March 15, 2025, about six days after the conclusion of the search operation,” the A-G said, and wondered if there were valid reasons to conduct the search.
In order to satisfy themselves on the issue, the judges read the ‘reasons to believe’ submitted to them by the ED in a sealed cover and returned the document back to Mr. Ramesh after perusing it in open court. Though Mr. Raju said the judges could retain the document with them until the delivery of judgment on the present batch of writ petitions, the judges declined to do so since the contents of the document were confidential.
After an elaborate hearing, the judges directed the High Court Registry to list the matter again on Monday (April 21, 2025) for the short reply of senior counsel Vikas Singh for TASMAC and said that the judgment would be reserved after hearing his arguments.
Published – April 17, 2025 03:37 pm IST
