Mukesh Ranjan
New Delhi, June 13
The number of cases registered by the ED under criminal provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) has seen an exponential jump after 2014, the year when PM Modi assumed power at the Centre. According to the official website of the ED, the agency registered a total of 5,422 Enforcement Case Information Reports (ECIR) since 2002, the year the PMLA was enacted by then government led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Sources, however, contended that of the total 5,422 ECIR, which is equivalent to a police FIR, 5,310 (almost 98 per cent) were registered in the last eight years.
The rise in the number of PMLA cases and related search and seizure operations can also be attributed to the changes made in the Act in 2012 and 2019 that gave more powers to the ED.
In 2012, during the UPA tenure, the amendments were brought in to expand the definition of offence under money laundering to include activities like concealment, acquisition, possession and use of proceeds of crime. It also provided powers to the ED to go in for provisional attachment and confiscation of property of any person.
The 2019 amendment to the PMLA expanded the ambit of “proceeds of crime” to those properties which “may directly or indirectly be derived or obtained as a result of any criminal activity relatable to the scheduled offence”.
The ED’s official data also shows a very discouraging rate of conviction in cases registered by it. Till date, only 25 persons have been convicted, which comes out to be less than 1 per cent of the cases the agency has been probing.
The data also showed that so far the ED had issued 1,739 provisional attachment orders under the PMLA. Assets worth Rs 1,04,702 crore had been seized, of which assets worth Rs 58,591 crore have been confirmed by the adjudicating authority under the anti-money laundering law.
The ED has till March 31, 2022, arrested 400 persons as part of its investigation under the PMLA and could file 992 prosecution complaints, which are equivalent to police chargesheets.
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