ED raids Karti's premises, Chidambaram says agency has no jurisdiction

On Thursday, ED had issued fresh summons to Karti Chidambaram who is the son of senior Congress leader and ex FM P Chidambaram, after he left out his appearance before it in links with the INX Media money laundering case probe.

Apart from this, his son, Karti Chidambaram's house and office in Chennai and Delhi were searched by the Enforcement Directorate.

ED official charged that Karti had "also closed certain bank accounts and attempted to close other bank accounts in order to frustrate the process of attachment" under the PMLA.

The central probe agency had registered a case against him and others in May this year.

"Since they had the search warrant, I did not raise any objections to the search but I said I will record my protest that there is no FIR in respect of the scheduled crime registered by any investigating agency including the CBI".

The former finance minister said that the ED officials searched the place "including the kitchen and the bathroom and obviously they found nothing". Nothing was recovered from Karti's house during the raid.

Chidambaram said the ED has "no jurisdiction" to conduct such searches under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). The raids were conducted after Karti "failed" to join the investigation, sources told News18. There were about five officials at their residence.

The case relates to the approvals the Foreign Investment Promotion Board granted for the Aircel-Maxis deal in 2006 when P Chidambaram was the finance minister.

The law enforcement agency, in its investigation, also found that the amount for FIPB approval was wrongly projected to hide the facts. Karti Chidambaram is accused of facilitating bribes in the Aircel-Maxis transaction.

In 2011, former Aircel head C Sivasankaran complained to the CBI that he was being forced by then telecom minister Dayanidhi Maran to sell Aircel to the Malaysia-based Maxis Communications group owned by T Ananda Krishnan.