ED raids Punjab minister Sanjeev Arora, 2nd action against AAP leaders in a week

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Friday conducted searches at the residence of Punjab Cabinet Minister Sanjeev Arora in Ludhiana. An ED team reached his house early in the morning, while central police forces were deployed outside the premises.

The agency also carried out searches at the residences and business premises of Arora’s associates, including his business partner Hemanth Sood in Ludhiana and Chandrasekhar Aggarwal in Jalandhar. Arora’s son, Kavya Arora, who is currently the managing director of M/s Hampton Sky Realty Ltd (formerly M/s Ritesh Properties and Industries Ltd), is also being searched.

This is the second ED action against an Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader within a week. A few days back, the federal probe agency conducted FEMA searches at the premises of AAP Rajya Sabha MP Ashok Kumar Mittal and his educational institutions in Punjab and Haryana.

Reacting to the raids, AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal said in a post on X, “This is the second ED raid on an AAP leader in three days. Will the Prime Minister tell how much black money has been recovered in all these raids conducted so far? Has even a single rupee been found? The whole country is watching how low politics is being done just for power.”

According to the ED, Arora is the promoter of Hampton Sky Realty Ltd, a company involved in large-scale real estate and infrastructure projects in Punjab. The agency said that the company is under scrutiny for multiple alleged irregularities, including illegal change of land use, booking fraudulent and inflated sales to boost share prices, insider trading, round-tripping of funds, and routing illegal betting money from the UAE to India.

The ED said that during its investigation, it found that Hampton Sky Limited (erstwhile Ritesh Properties Industries Limited) and Royal Industries Limited were allotted industrial land in Punjab with certain conditions. However, Royal Industries Limited allegedly sold the land in violation of those conditions, while Hampton Sky Limited allegedly alienated the land without Punjab government permission and developed commercial projects on it.

The agency further alleged that Hemanth Sood, who runs M/s Findoc Finvest Private Limited with operations in Ludhiana, Gurgaon, and Gujarat’s GIFT City, partnered with Arora and assisted in round-tripping funds from the UAE and generating proceeds of crime through insider trading. The ED also claimed that Sood aided betting and hawala operators in laundering money and routing it back into India through the Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI) route.

Chandrasekhar Aggarwal, a Jalandhar-based businessman, allegedly began as a cricket bookie before expanding into hawala operations. The ED alleged that he ran a betting platform named “Khiladi Book” and cheated thousands of people. It further claimed that the proceeds of crime generated by Aggarwal were parked in the UAE and later brought back into India through Findoc and invested in real estate via Arora.

The ED also suspects that Arora provided protection to illegal betting operators in Punjab using his political influence in exchange for a share of their profits. It alleged that he used his companies and entry operators to convert unaccounted money into legitimate investments, thereby facilitating money laundering. Additionally, the agency said that Arora’s companies are under scrutiny for booking fake export bills, round-tripping funds from the UAE, and recording fake purchases from non-existent GST entities.

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