ED’s western region special director given charge of eastern region

The ED appoints Satyabrata Kumar to lead financial crime investigations in Eastern India, focusing on online fraud and asset restitution efforts.

MUMBAI: In what is being seen as special assignment, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday allocated the charge of its Kolkata-headquartered Eastern Region (whose jurisdiction runs across 10 states) to Satyabrata Kumar, a 2004-batch officer of the IRS (Customs and Indirect Taxes), who is the Special Director of Enforcement (SDE) of the Mumbai-headquartered Western Region that covers five states including Maharashtra. An ace investigator of complex financial crimes, Kumar has an impeccable career record and built a formidable informants’ network during his 11-year-old stints with the agency in Maharashtra.

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He has been entrusted the task of expediting ED’s crackdown on financial crimes in the eastern-north-eastern states, including burgeoning cases of online fraud and gaming/betting, spearheading the agency’s current focus on restitution of assets to defrauded victims as well as look at a clutch of sensitive cases, agency sources said.

Subhas Agrawal, SDE, Eastern Region, will replace Kumar with immediate effect or until further order as SDE, Western Region, according to ED’s Tuesday order. The agency’s directive was based on the order of the union ministry of Finance.

Kumar is said to have a no-nonsense approach and provides pro-active leadership to his teams in supervising the gathering of cutting -edge intelligence to aid in solving cases and tracing proceeds of crime as per provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Kumar had earlier served as a staff officer to the former ED Director, Sanjay Kumar Mishra, in Delhi.

During his stints as ED’s Joint Director and SDE in Mumbai/Western Region, Kumar led several of the agency’s high-profile PMLA probes. These included the alleged ₹12,500-crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) scam involving accused fugitive diamantaires Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi; the alleged ₹9,200 -crore bank loan cases involving fugitive liquor baron Vijay Mallya’s defunct airline firm, Kingfisher Airlines Limited; ED’s alleged money laundering and terror-financing cases against the deceased narcotics trafficker, Memon Iqbal Mohammed or Iqbal Mirchi; ED’s PMLA case against Yes Bank founder Rana Kapoor, who is an accused in the Yes Bank-Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Limited (DHFL) transactions; and the agency’s PMLA probe related to the USD 1 million-plus Mahadev Online Book (MOB) illegal online betting/gaming cases, which unearthed a German national, Lark Marshall, as one of its suspected controllers.

Kumar’s team gathered the critical evidence and intelligence that led to the tracking and subsequent arrest of Nirav Modi in London in March 2019, United Kingdom, and UK’s authorities’s subsequent decision to approve India’s extradition request after the courts there ruled that he was an alleged ‘flight risk’ and had a case to answer for in Indian courts, sources said. Kumar visited London at least nine times with other key officials to represent India in the UK to liaise with Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), for hearings related to Mallya’s extradition and Nirav’s bail plea.

Long before a UK daily caught up with the absconding diamond trader during a stroll in London, Kumar and his team knew he was hiding in London. The ED team had tracked his every move in the preceding months. He allegedly had a Facebook account in the name of Edmond Dantes. ED found an email address of Modi during a raid at one of his Mumbai offices and later found the Facebook account linked to it. ED’s probe also allegedly found that Modi had paid for obtaining the honorary citizenship of Vanuatu in late 2017 but the country’s immigration authorities declined his request.

Sources said Kumar’s priorities in Kolkata could include the agency’s ongoing PMLA probe related to alleged financial irregularities at RG Kar Medical College and Hospital. A woman trainee doctor was found dead in the seminar hall of RG Kar Medical College and Hospital on August 9. She had allegedly been raped and killed; a case that is being probed by the CBI. Also, he may look at the online fraud case involving the HPZ token app - which allegedly involves misleading the public into investing in non-existent cryptocurrency mining machines and revealed the role of 76 Chinese-controlled entities and 10 Chinese directors in the case.