ED freezes Rs 440 crore in Trinamool Congress bank accounts under PMLA

Kolkata: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) said on Wednesday that it has frozen more than Rs 440 crore lying in the bank accounts of the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC) under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The funds were frozen after the agency’s Kolkata zonal office conducted search operations at five premises in and around Kolkata belonging to the Carewell group, which provides aircraft charter services. According to the agency, its probe found that AITC funds were routed through a Carewell group company that used the money to purchase aircraft.

The searches were conducted in connection with an investigation into money laundering based on an FIR lodged by the Bidhannagar cyber police over alleged “dishonest financial dealings, unlawful collection of money and routing of suspected funds through certain bank accounts of All India Trinamool Congress”, the agency said in a news release. The ED said it froze Rs 440.42 crore held in three HDFC bank accounts of the party.


Its investigation revealed that around Rs 160 crore was transferred from AITC’s bank accounts to Carewell Aviation India Pvt Ltd and its related entity, mostly between April 2023 to June 2026, the ED said. Carewell Aviation routed Rs 82.96 crore during 2023–2026 to another newly incorporated related entity to purchase an Embrarer Legacy 600 plane and an Agusta 109 GrandNew helicopter, the agency claimed. According to it, Rs 112 crore was used for the purchases. Another $1.7 million, it said, was arranged as an unsecured loan in 2023 from a Cayman Islands-based entity to purchase the helicopter.

The plane and helicopter were subsequently rented out to the AITC itself, even though they were purchased from the corpus of the party, the ED release said. “Thereafter, substantial amounts were transferred on the pretext of aircraft usage. The above stated dubious arrangement is under investigation to ascertain the actual beneficial purpose of the transactions," it said, adding that the investigation was ongoing.