Multi-crore hawala racket busted

Not much is heard about the Enforcement Directorate ED these days, but the agency recorded one of its biggest successes two days ago when ...

Not much is heard about the Enforcement Directorate ED these days, but the agency recorded one of its biggest successes two days ago when a Chennai-based operator confessed to having indulged in hawala transactions to the tune of Rs 237 crore.

K.K. Aziz also landed the ED with one of its biggest cash recoveries, as over Rs 1 crore was found in his house when the ED team swooped down.

ED Chief R.N. Das described the Chennai case as probably the biggest hawala recovery in a decade.

8216;8216;We developed the case after five months of telephone and physical surveillance. Since the hawala operations were huge and were being carried out from Dubai, we have informed other Central intelligence agencies and the Home Ministry about the nature of evidence,8217;8217; he told The Indian Express.8217;8217;

With the Foreign Exchange Management ACT FEMA now in force as a civil law, Aziz has not been arrested but faced sustained questioning. His interrogation and documents recovered from his house revealed that since August 2003, the operator had handled hawala transactions totalling Rs 237 crore.

The documents also show that the operator had been handling illegal transactions for people in several cities in South India. Aziz had himself shifted the base of his operations three times during the period of surveillance.

Since the FEMA regime was adopted over in 1999, the ED has been busying itself wrapping up adjudication in some 24,000 odd cases booked under the old Foreign Exchange Regulation Act FERA regime.

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Large hawala seizures like the one made in Chennai have been few but as the ED chief says, 8216;8216;The case shows how still a large quantum of illegal transactions are still being done by single operators in India.8217;8217;

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More