THE NUMBER EVERYONE QUOTES
The financials and functioning of India's most powerful investigative agency, the Enforcement Directorate (ED), remain one of the country's deepest mysteries.
ED's 2024–25 Annual Report leads with a conviction rate of 93.6 per cent. It is the kind of number that travels — into parliamentary answers, FATF briefings, television debates. It signals a precision instrument of enforcement, surgical and effective.
Then you look at how it is calculated.
The ED has filed 1,739 prosecution complaints under PMLA since its inception. Of those, the number that have reached a final court verdict is a measly:
“47”
“Forty-seven.”
The 93.6 per cent rate is drawn from that sliver — 2.7 per cent of total cases. The remaining 97 per cent are still pending, grinding through special courts, and do not enter the headline figure at all.
This is not a conviction rate. It is a denominator chosen to produce a specific result. And there is no independent audit in existence that has ever been in a position to say so officially. This raises a simple question: Does ED cook its conviction rate?
2.7 per cent of cases were used to calculate a 93.6 per cent conviction rate. The other 97.3per cent are pending — and quietly excluded from the headline.
Rs 1.54 LAKH CRORE — WITH NO ONE COUNTING
The conviction rate is not even the most consequential unverified number in the report. That distinction belongs to the asset attachment figure: Rs 1,54,594 crore in cumulative provisional attachments — land, buildings, companies, bank accounts, all frozen under suspicion, often for years.
In FY25 alone, the ED attached Rs 30,036 crore worth of property. A claimed increase of 141 per cent over the previous year.
How are these assets valued? No independent audit has verified the methodology. No CAG team has examined whether valuations are consistent, conservative, or inflated. The number is self-reported, self-certified, and travels into FATF evaluations and parliamentary answers as established fact.
The report also claims Rs 5,238 crore in FEMA penalties levied in FY25. It does not disclose how much of that has actually been recovered. That single missing figure would transform the story. Its absence is not accidental.
THE AUDITOR THAT ISN'T THERE
The ED's entire budget flows from the Consolidated Fund of India. Under Article 148-151 of the Constitution and Section 13 of the CAG Act 1971, this means all of it is within the Comptroller and Auditor General's jurisdiction.
In practice, the CAG audits the administrative shell — salaries, buildings, and procurement. It has never conducted a dedicated performance audit of the ED's enforcement functions. Not once, in the agency's entire history, has such an audit been tabled before Parliament. Income Tax has faced it. Customs has faced it. The ED has not.
The 212-page Annual Report for 2024–25 does not contain a single reference to the CAG. Not a footnote or a line. The agency that constitutionally exists to audit this institution is absent from the document as though it does not exist.
No standalone CAG performance audit of ED has ever been tabled in Parliament. The Income Tax Department has faced one. Customs has. The ED has not.
THE DISCLAIMER NOBODY NOTICED
Towards the back of the report, there is a line that deserves far more attention than it receives. The Directorate of Enforcement states that it does not accept responsibility or liability for error of fact, omission, interpretation, or opinion that may be present in the document.
In other words: these are our numbers. We stand by them. But we take no responsibility if they are wrong.
In a functioning accountability system, an external auditor fills precisely this gap. Here, the gap remains open. The self-reported figures — conviction rate, attachment values, penalty collections — go into the world unchallenged because there is no institutional mechanism with the standing to challenge them.
WHAT COUNTS AS OVERSIGHT HERE
The ED is not without oversight. Courts intervene case by case. FATF evaluated India positively in 2024. Internal vigilance systems track files and summons. These are real.
But courts examine individual cases, not systemic patterns. FATF assesses legal frameworks, not specific institutional performance. Internal vigilance is self-policing. None of them answers the question that a performance audit would: is this institution, taken as a whole, functioning as it claims?
That question has not been asked. Not formally nor by anyone with the institutional authority to demand an answer and place it before the Parliament.
THE CONDITION, PLAINLY STATED
The ED is one of the most powerful agencies in the Indian state. It can freeze assets before any court has adjudicated guilt. It can arrest under constraints looser than ordinary criminal law. It controls Rs 1.54 lakh crore of attached property.
It measures its own success. It verifies its own numbers. It publishes its own account of its performance and disclaims responsibility for that account's accuracy. Parliament receives that account without an audit report that would allow it to interrogate what it is reading.
The fact that ED has worked this way — unchallenged, unremarked, across successive annual reports — may be the most important detail of all. |
