The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has arrested Ashok Pal, Chief Financial Officer of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Power, in a money laundering case linked to a fake bank guarantee of ₹68 crore, PTI reported. Pal was taken into custody on Friday night under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). He will appear in a special court on Saturday, where the ED will seek permission for custodial interrogation.
The case involves a ₹68.2 crore bank guarantee submitted to the Solar Energy Corporation of India Limited (SECI) by Reliance NU BESS Limited, a subsidiary of Reliance Power. The guarantee was found to be fake. The company allegedly worked with Odisha-based Biswal Tradelink, which is accused of running a fake bank guarantee racket.
Earlier in August, the ED raided the company and arrested its Managing Director, Partha Sarathi Biswal. The investigation started from a November 2024 FIR by Delhi Police’s Economic Offences Wing, which said the fake guarantees were issued for an 8% commission.
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.
Reliance Power said it was a “victim of fraud, forgery and cheating.” The company had informed the stock exchange about the matter in November 2024 and filed a criminal complaint against the third party with Delhi Police in October 2024.
The ED found that the accused company used a fake email domain — s-bi.co.in, similar to SBI’s official sbi.co.in — to send forged messages to SECI. The company also issued fake bills for commissions and used several hidden bank accounts to transfer crores of rupees. The company is described as a “paper company” with its registered office at a residential property of a relative of Biswal. No records of the company were found during ED searches.
