New Delhi, Oct 13 (UNI) A court today granted the Enforcement Directorate (ED) three more days of custodial remand for Ashok Kumar Pal, the Chief Financial Officer of Reliance Power, in a money laundering case related to a fake loan guarantee of Rs 68 crore.
Pal, who was already on a two-day ED remand, was produced before the court, which extended his custody after the federal probe agency argued that further interrogation was necessary.
The ED alleged that Pal, as CFO of the Anil Ambani Group company, was central to a scheme to defraud the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI) by submitting a bogus bank guarantee for over Rs 68 crore.
According to a senior ED official, Pal was taken into custody after being summoned for questioning at the agency’s Delhi office. Following an extended interrogation, he was formally arrested.
Pal is scheduled to be produced before a special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court later today, where the ED will request that he be remanded to their custody for further investigation.
The ED stated that Pal, as CFO of the publicly listed Reliance Power Limited (RPL), played a crucial role in the diversion of funds. A board resolution had empowered him and others to finalize, approve, sign and execute all documents for SECI’s BESS tender, and to use RPL’s financial capability for the bid.
“He played a crucial role in submitting a bogus bank guarantee of over Rs 68 crores to SECI, with the intention to cheat this PSU,” the ED alleged.
The agency further claimed that Pal was instrumental in the planning, supervision, funding and concealment of the forged bank guarantee scheme used in the SECI tender.
“He played a vital role in selecting Biswal Tradelink Pvt Ltd (BTPL) to provide the fake bank guarantee. BTPL is a small entity operating from a residential address with no credible BG track record. It executed a non-genuine guarantee without any vendor due diligence. The director of BTPL, Partha Sarathi Biswal, is already in judicial custody,” the ED said.
The ED has also alleged that Pal played a crucial role in diverting money through fake transport invoices worth crores of rupees. He approved releases and facilitated paperwork via Telegram and WhatsApp, operating outside the normal SAP and vendor master workflow.
The scale of the fraud is highlighted by the fact that the Reliance Power group submitted a bank guarantee purportedly from FirstRand Bank, Manila, Philippines, despite the fact that this bank has no branch in the Philippines.
He also played a crucial part in using the services of a fake bank guarantee racket that utilized spoofed domains designed to mimic those of major Indian commercial banks. For example, the email address sbi.17313@s-bi.co.in is not an official State Bank of India domain but a look-alike created by inserting a hyphen into ‘sbi’.
The racket used other deceptive domains such as: lndianbank.in (using ‘l’ instead of ‘I’)· lndusindbank.in,· pnblndia.in, · psdbank.co.in,· siliguripnb.co.in,· Iobbank.co.in, and unionbankoflndia.co.in. These domains employed single-character swaps and minor textual tweaks to impersonate legitimate banks in emails and letters, thereby presenting forged instruments as genuine.
Pal played a crucial part in this fraud, which ultimately harms the public, the ED added.
