ED makes 3rd arrest in Reliance Power 'fake' bank guarantee linked PMLA case

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has made yet another arrest in its widening money laundering probe linked to a Rs 68-crore fake bank guarantee allegedly issued on behalf of Reliance Power, part of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group, in a case that reads like a corporate thriller of deceit, digital disguise, and financial sleight of hand.

Officials said the latest person to be taken into custody is Amar Nath Dutta, who was arrested on Thursday under provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and remanded to four days of ED custody by a special court. This marks the third arrest in the case, following the earlier detention of Ashok Kumar Pal, former CFO of Reliance Power, and Partha Sarathi Biswal, managing director of an Odisha-based firm, Biswal Tradelink — the company at the heart of the alleged forgery racket.

The investigation centres on a bank guarantee worth Rs 68.2 crore, submitted to the Solar Energy Corporation of India Ltd (SECI) on behalf of Reliance NU BESS Ltd, a Reliance Power subsidiary formerly known as Maharashtra Energy Generation Ltd. The guarantee, purportedly issued by the FirstRand Bank in Manila, Philippines, was later found to be fabricated — the bank, investigators discovered, had no branch in the country at all.

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According to the ED, Biswal Tradelink was running a sophisticated racket peddling fake bank guarantees for an 8 per cent commission. To lend credibility to its forgeries, the company allegedly used a deceptive email domain — s-bi.co.in — designed to mimic the State Bank of India’s official domain (sbi.co.in), thus creating an illusion of authenticity in its correspondence with SECI.

The ED described Biswal Tradelink as a “paper entity” with its registered office located at a residential property belonging to a relative of Biswal.

The money laundering case stems from a November 2024 FIR filed by Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW), which first unearthed the contours of the fake guarantee network.

While the ED’s probe has drawn the Reliance Power name into controversy, the company has strongly denied any wrongdoing, maintaining that it is a “victim of fraud, forgery, and cheating conspiracy”. It said the matter was fully disclosed to the stock exchanges on 7 November 2024, and that it had itself filed a criminal complaint against the accused third party with the EOW in October 2024.

A Reliance Group spokesperson reiterated that Anil Ambani has “not been on the board of Reliance Power for more than three and a half years” and has “no connection with the matter in any manner.”

As the ED unravels what it believes to be a web of falsified documents and forged digital identities, the case underscores the growing menace of financial cyber deception — a crime that hides behind the veneer of corporate legitimacy but leaves behind a trail of broken trust and fabricated paper.

With PTI inputs