Ranchi, May 8 : India’s Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted raids at nine locations across Jharkhand and West Bengal on Thursday as part of an ongoing money laundering investigation linked to a massive fake Goods and Services Tax (GST) invoice racket, official sources said.
The coordinated search operations targeted premises in Ranchi, Jamshedpur, and Kolkata, including the residence of real estate developer Vivek Narsaria on Kanke Road in Ranchi, the sources added.
According to investigators, the accused allegedly generated fake invoices worth ₹14,325 crore, resulting in ineligible input tax credit (ITC) claims exceeding ₹800 crore. The agency said it is working to trace assets and documents suspected to be linked to the proceeds of crime under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
The raids follow earlier arrests of key accused in the case — Shiv Kumar Deora, Amit Gupta, and Sumit Gupta — all of whom were allegedly involved in floating dummy companies and producing fraudulent invoices to claim tax benefits illegally.
Deora was previously arrested in 2024 by the Directorate General of GST Intelligence (DGGI) in Jamshedpur in a separate but related case involving GST fraud amounting to ₹132 crore. The investigation at the time had indicated that the scam could be significantly larger, potentially surpassing ₹500 crore, with links spreading across Jharkhand, Odisha, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, and Tamil Nadu.
Authorities suspect the trio to be central figures in a well-organized interstate network that used fictitious sales transactions to exploit the GST system. Officials said Thursday’s searches aim to expand the crackdown on fraudulent ITC claims and uncover further beneficiaries of the alleged scam.
“Fake sales records were allegedly used to illegally claim tax benefits,” one official familiar with the probe said, adding that documents recovered during the search will undergo forensic examination in the coming days.
