New Delhi: Trouble has begun to mount for former finance minister P. Chidambaram’s son, Karti Chidambaram, with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) registering a money laundering case against him on Friday morning.
The agency registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), which is the ED’s equivalent of a first information report (FIR), against the accused named in the complaint filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), on Monday night. The accused included Karti Chidambaram, INX Media and its directors, Peter and Indrani Mukerjea, and others “unknown officials on the finance ministry”.
The ECIR has been registered under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), the ED stated.
“We will probe the alleged proceeds of crime and alleged kickbacks generated in this case and will take the investigations forward from there,” said a senior ED official, on the condition of anonymity.
While the ED did not clarify whether or not it would attach the assets of those named in the ECIR, the move comes as Karti Chidambaram left for London on Thursday night, while his office maintained that he had “gone on work and would be back by the end of May”.
The fresh case comes just two days after the CBI raided 14 premises across Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai in connection with Karti Chidambaram and former INX Media bosses Peter and Indrani Mukerjea.
The CBI had also filed an FIR that named Karti Chidamabaram. The CBI alleged that Karti received kickbacks from this company when his father was the finance minister. This was in return for his help in allegedly getting the finance ministry to overlook irregularities.
Specifically, INX Media crossed the approved limit of foreign direct investment (FDI) by several hundred crores and “made a downstream investment to the tune of 26% of its capital”, according to Vineet Vinayak, joint director of CBI.