NEW DELHI: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has frozen Rs 440.42 crore held in bank accounts belonging to the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) as part of a money laundering investigation into chartered flights used by a senior party leader, the agency said on Wednesday.
The ED conducted searches at five locations in and around Kolkata in West Bengal targeting private aviation firm Carewell Aviation, its directors and an electoral trust.
The agency said the frozen funds were held in three HDFC Bank accounts.
"Investigation revealed that around Rs 160 crore was transferred from AITC bank accounts to M/s Carewell Aviation India Pvt. Ltd. and its related entity, mostly between April 2023 to June 2026," the agency said in a statement.
The federal agency further said that Carewell Aviation Pvt Ltd routed Rs 82.96 crore between 2023 and 2026 to another newly incorporated related entity to purchase an Embraer Legacy 600 aircraft and an Agusta 109 Grand helicopter. A total of Rs 112 crore was used to make the purchases.
The agency further found that a loan of USD 1.7 million was arranged in 2023 from a Cayman Islands-based entity as an unsecured loan to purchase the helicopter.
The Embraer Legacy 600 aircraft and the Agusta helicopter were subsequently leased to the AITC, even though they had been purchased using funds from the party's corpus. Thereafter, substantial amounts were transferred on the pretext of aircraft usage.
The ED said the arrangement was under investigation to ascertain the actual beneficial purpose of the transactions.
The probe was initiated following a police complaint alleging that chartered flights used by TMC's general secretary Abhishek Banerjee and a senior party leader, were funded through improperly collected money, agency sources said.
The TMC has not yet issued a public response to the searches.
The raids come amid an internal split within the party, which has led to a separate legal dispute over control of the TMC's finances, now pending before the Calcutta High Court.
The court declined on Tuesday to fast-track a related petition, court records showed.
The ED said its investigation was continuing.
