Who is Partha Sarathi Biswal, first to be arrested in ₹3,000-crore Enforcement Directorate case against Anil Ambani?

The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Saturday arrested Partha Sarathi Biswal, the managing director of an Odisha firm, in connection with a money laundering case against businessman Anil Ambani.

Biswal allegedly ran a "fake" bank guarantee issuance racket for business groups. His company is suspected of providing one such assurance worth ₹68 crores for a Reliance Group company, officials said, as per a PTI report.

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Biswal, who is the Managing Director of Biswal Tradelink (BTPL), had been taken into custody from Bhubhaneswar on Friday, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). This followed searches at the company's three premises in Bhubhaneswar, as well as one "associate" entity in Kolkata.  

A court remanded Biswal to ED custody till August 6. Anil Ambani, however, was summoned for ED questioning on August 5.

According to the ED’s findings, BTPL had arranged fraudulent bank guarantees worth about ₹68 crores, backed by forged endorsements from the State Bank of India—the nation's largest lender.

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These attempts at forgery also accompanied a number of fraudulent confirmation emails that used spoofed SBI email IDs: they allegedly used the domain "s-bi.co.in", which is quite close to SBI's original domain, "sbi.co.in".

The BTPL guarantees, which were found to be "fake", had reportedly been used to provide assurance to the Solar Energy Corporation of India (SECI), on behalf of Reliance NU BESS Limited, a subsidiary of Reliance Power. For this purpose, it had been the subject of a November 2024 FIR filed by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) of the Delhi Police.

The ED has also uncovered that BTPL allegedly received ₹5.4 crores from Reliance Power Ltd—a company owned by Anil Ambani—for facilitating the fake bank guarantee. This is an important part of the financial trail linking BTPL’s fraudulent operations to Anil Ambani’s corporate network, officials said, as per a Business Standard report.

However, a Reliance Group spokesperson on Friday declared that the company had been a "victim of fraud, forgery, and cheating conspiracy", and that the company had made the necessary disclosures to the stock exchanges on November 7, 2024, the PTI report added.

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