The Enforcement Directorate (ED) has intensified its crackdown on the Wadhawan family, launching a powerful two-pronged assault in connection with two of India’s most significant financial scandals. In a major development, the agency has provisionally attached assets worth approximately ₹185.84 crore in the Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd. (DHFL) bank fraud case. Simultaneously, the ED has filed a fresh supplementary chargesheet in the HDIL-PMC Bank scam, naming eight additional accused in a conspiracy to launder funds through fraudulent land deals.
The latest action in the DHFL case, dated September 5, 2025, targets assets linked to former promoters Kapil Wadhawan and Dheeraj Wadhawan. The attached properties include 154 flats and the receivables pertaining to another 20 flats located in Mumbai. This brings the total value of attachments in the DHFL investigation to ₹256.23 crore.
The ED’s probe is based on a CBI FIR filed against DHFL and the Wadhawan brothers for allegedly orchestrating a criminal conspiracy to defraud a consortium of 17 banks led by Union Bank of India. Investigations revealed that the accused siphoned off and misappropriated huge sums of bank loans by falsifying DHFL’s books. The agency also found that during 2017-18, the Wadhawans allegedly diverted funds to rig the price and trading volumes of DHFL’s publicly listed stock.
In a parallel move against their relatives, Rakesh and Sarang Wadhawan of Housing Development and Infrastructure Ltd. (HDIL), the ED has exposed another layer of the Punjab & Maharashtra Co-operative (PMC) Bank scam. The agency filed its third supplementary prosecution complaint (chargesheet) on June 4, 2025, which the Special PMLA Court took cognizance of on July 25, 2025.
This new complaint details how the promoters of HDIL allegedly laundered money from the fraudulent bank loans to acquire agricultural lands in Maharashtra’s Sindhudurg District. The land was acquired through a network of benamidars, allegedly led by an individual named Mukesh Khadpe, for a proposed Vijaydurg Port Project that was never executed. The ED has already attached these land parcels and has now requested their confiscation in the latest complaint.
The core of the PMC Bank scam involved HDIL and its group companies fraudulently obtaining Overdraft (OD) loans from the bank without sufficient documentation or mortgages. To prevent these loans from being classified as Non-Performing Assets (NPAs), bank officials colluded with the promoters, falsifying records by replacing 44 genuine NPA accounts of the HDIL group with 21,049 fictitious loan accounts to deceive the Reserve Bank of India and the bank’s depositors. To date, the ED has attached assets worth over ₹772 crore in the PMC Bank case.
With investigations progressing in both high-profile cases, the ED’s coordinated actions signal a tightening noose on the perpetrators of these massive financial frauds that have shaken the country’s banking and real estate sectors.
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