ED arrests executive of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group in fake bank guarantee-linked PMLA case

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested Ashok Pal, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of Reliance Power, on Friday (October 10, 2025) night under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, after questioning at Delhi office in a case of alleged fake bank guarantee of ₹68 crore.

A judge of a special court gave the ED two days’ custody of Ashok Pal, after which he will be produced again before a designated court on Monday (October 13).

Mr. Pal is the Chief Financial Officer of Reliance Power Limited (RPL), a listed company in which public holds more than 75% shares.

The accused played a crucial role in “diversion of funds” from a public listed company, the agency has alleged.

The company’s board resolution had empowered him and others to finalise, approve, sign, and execute all documents for Solar Energy Corporation of India’s (SECI) Battery Energy Storage System tenders, and to use RPL’s financial capability for the bid, it alleged.

The ED has alleged that he played a crucial role in submitting “bogus” Bank Guarantee (BG) of over ₹68 crore to SECI, with an intention to cheat. “He played a crucial role in the planning, supervision, funding, and concealment of the forged BG scheme used in the SECI tender,” said an agency source.

The accused was instrumental in selecting Biswal Tradelink Pvt. Ltd. to provide the fake BG, according to the ED. BTPL is a small entity operating from a residential address with no credible BG track record. Without vendor diligence, a “non-genuine” BG was executed, the source alleged.

BTPL director, Partha Sarathi Biswal, is already in judicial custody. He was allegedly involved in the diversion of money through “fake transport invoices”. “He approved releases and facilitated paperwork via Telegram/WhatsApp, outside normal SAP/vendor master workflow. The degree of fraud can be gauged from the fact that the Reliance Power group submitted a BG from FirstRand Bank, Manila, Philippines…there exists no branch of FirstRand Bank in the Philippines,” the source said.

The ED has purportedly found that Mr. Biswal played “a crucial part” in taking the services of a fake BG racket which used fake and spoofed domains of Indian commercial banks of India. Biswal Tradelink, according to the ED, was a “mere paper entity” as its registered office was a residential property belonging to a relative of Biswal.

“The fake BG racket used by Mr. Ashok Pal also uses lookalike bank domains such as lndianbank.in, lndusindbank.in, pnblndia.in, psdbank.co.in, siliguripnb.co.in, Iobbank.co.in and unionbankoflndia.co.in, each employing single-character swaps (notably ‘l’ in place of ‘i’) or minor textual tweaks intended to visually pass as official. The sole utility of these domains is to impersonate banks in emails/letters, thereby projecting forged instruments as genuine,” said the source.

The Reliance Group had then said that Reliance Power had been a “victim of fraud, forgery and cheating conspiracy” in this case and it had made due disclosures in this context to the stock exchange on November 7, 2024.

A group spokesperson said a criminal complaint was lodged by them against the third party (accused company) with Delhi Police’s EOW in October 2024 and the “due process” of law would follow.

(with inputs from PTI)