Congress protests as ED raids office of National Herald

The raids came a week after Congress president Sonia Gandhi was questioned in the case for 11 hours over three days; earlier, senior party leader Rahul Gandhi was quizzed for almost 50 hours over five days in June.

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Tuesday conducted raids at 12 locations, including Herald House at Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg in Delhi, in connection with its money laundering probe into the affairs of the National Herald newspaper, people familiar with the matter said.

Media personnel gather outside the Herald House amid ED raids in the National Herald money laundering case, in New Delhi on Tuesday. (ANI)

The raids came a week after Congress president Sonia Gandhi was questioned in the case for 11 hours over three days; earlier, senior party leader Rahul Gandhi was quizzed for almost 50 hours over five days in June.

People familiar with the developments said the searches were carried out under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) at Herald House, the office of a Kolkata shell company, and other premises of Young Indian Pvt Ltd (YI), which took over Associated Journals Ltd (AJL) in 2010, to gather documentary evidence to find a money trail against the entities involved in the case based on fresh facts that emerged after the questioning of several persons, including the Gandhis. Herald House is the head office of AJL.

Senior Congress politicians such as Mallikarjun Kharge and Pawan Kumar Bansal were also questioned by ED in April.

The Congress termed the ED raids at the National Herald premises as political vendetta.

“This is the first time in independent India that the government is acting upon political hatred and revenge… This is absolute rock bottom for Indian politics to set petty personal scores and to intimidate India’s opposition,” party spokesperson Supriya Shrinate said.

Kharge said, “This is political vendetta to ruin the image of the Congress... The party will not tolerate these kinds of actions by the government.” He added that the BJP-led government wants to “suppress the voice of Congress and create fear”.

AJL was founded in November 1937 by Jawaharlal Nehru and published the National Herald in English, Qaumi Awaz in Urdu, and Navjeevan in Hindi. Income tax proceedings, initiated in 2017, which are the basis of the ED’s probe, revealed that YI purchased a ₹90.21 crore interest-free loan given by the All-India Congress Committee to AJL, by making a payment of only ₹50 lakh to the former.

Investigators said YI was founded in November 2010, just 23 days prior to the assigning of the ₹90 crore loan, with a nominal capital of ₹5 lakh. “Young Indian did not even have any funds of its own for purchase of the loan of ₹90 crore of the AICC,” an IT department document seen by HT stated.

ED claims the transactions in AJL attract anti-money laundering charges as a complex web of transactions and routing of funds were undertaken by the party and its leaders to acquire AJL’s assets worth multiple crores of rupees.

The Gandhis are learnt to have told the ED during their separate questioning sessions that no personal assets were made in the Congress-AJL-National Herald deal as Young Indian was a not-for-profit company established under section 25 of the Companies Act.

They also told ED that AJL continues to have possession of all its assets and Young Indian neither “owns nor controls” these properties.

The ED action in the case was initiated after the agency late last year registered a fresh case under the PMLA after a trial court here took cognisance of an Income Tax department probe against Young Indian based on a private criminal complaint by BJP MP Subramanian Swamy in 2013.

Swamy accused the Gandhis and others of conspiring to cheat and misappropriate funds, with Young Indian paying only ₹50 lakh to obtain the right to recover ₹90.25 crore that Associated Journals Limited owed to the Congress. The Congress leaders have denied any wrongdoing, said the transactions were above board, and blamed the government of embarking on a “witch-hunt”.