ED has no power to seal a premises if it’s found locked during search operation, ASG concedes before Madras High Court

The court granted four weeks’ time for the ED to file its counter-affidavit to the petitioners’ main plea for declaring the search operation at the Alwarpet residence, as well as the sealing of the other two premises, as illegal.

Additional Solicitor General (ASG) S.V. Raju on Wednesday conceded before the Madras High Court that the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) is not empowered to seal a premises if it is found to be locked when the officials go over there for a search and seizure operation.

He also told a Division Bench of Justices M.S. Ramesh and V. Lakshminarayanan that the ED officials would withdraw forthwith two notices that were stuck on film producer Akash Baskaran’s office at Semmenchery and his friend Vikram Ravindran’s residence at Poes Garden in Chennai.

The notices had warned that no one should open the premises without the permission of the ED officials. The judges had on Tuesday wondered which provision of law empowers the ED to prevent people from entering their residence/office by pasting such notices on the entrance.

Responding to it on Wednesday, the ASG said, Section 17 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of 2002 empowers the ED officials to break open the locks for conducting a search. Since the officials did not want to take such a drastic action, they ended up pasting the two notices.

Mr. Raju also said, the ED officials themselves would have withdrawn the notices if the Mr. Baskaran and Mr. Ravindran had approached them instead of approaching the court. When the judges said, the notices amount to virtual sealing of the premises, the ASG conceded that ED had no such power.

He assured the court he would instruct the ED officials to not only withdraw the two notices but also return a laptop, a hard drive, two external hard discs, three iPhones, one more mobile phone and some documents that were seized from the Alwarpet residence of Mr. Baskaran on June 16, 2025 in the presence of his driver.

When senior counsel Vijay Narayan, representing the film producer, urged the court to grant an interim relief restraining the ED from taking any further action against his client since he had no connection with the TASMAC money laundering case, the judges reserved orders on the applications filed by the petitioners for interim relief.

The Bench also granted four weeks’ time for the ED to file its counter affidavit to the petitioners’ main plea for declaring the search operation at the Alwarpet residence, as well as the sealing of the other two premises, as illegal.

Published - June 18, 2025 07:44 pm IST