The Tamil Nadu government on Monday accused the Enforcement Directorate (ED) of misrepresenting and concealing crucial facts and deliberately trying to suppress the sequence of events in a plea it filed in the Madras High Court to direct the state police to register First Information Reports (FIRs) based on information it shared about river sand mining offences.
In a status report filed before Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G. Arul Murugan, the state said that the plea filed under Article 226 (Jurisdiction of High Courts) of the Constitution was not maintainable at all and that the ED should have approached the Supreme Court only under Article 131, which provides for resolution of one or more disputes between the Center and the States.
The Executive Director functions under the control of the Union Ministry of Finance and was the authority empowered under Section 49 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) 2012 to enforce the provisions of the legislation. “The ED, unlike the Central Bureau of Investigation, is not a separate statutory agency. But it is part of the Government of India itself,” the status report said.
Further, the state said that the ED has no constitutional rights that can be defended under Article 226, that one investigating agency cannot seek a writ against another agency. “Neither the ED is a legal entity, nor can it claim to exercise any of the rights conferred by the Constitution, which is a prerequisite for the issuance of an injunction under Article 226,” he added.
ED letter addressed to TN DGP ‘idle’
Apart from technical objections, the state said, the ED filed this petition only because the inquiry it conducted on the basis of unrelated FIRs registered by the state police regarding sand mining did not find favor with the Supreme Court. Therefore, the letter written by the ED to the Tamil Nadu Director General of Police (DGP) has become slavish, redundant and unnecessary, she alleged.
Providing a timeline, the state government said, the ED sent a communication to the DGP on June 13, 2024, urging the police chief to take necessary action based on the information shared by him on sand mining offences. Only then did the Madras High Court quash the ED investigation on 16 July 2024 and the decision was upheld by the Supreme Court in September 2025.
“Thus, the approach taken by the ED is stricken with the vice of the legal principle of suppressio veri sugestio falsi (suppression of truth is equivalent to insinuation of falsehood) and under no circumstances can the ED be accorded any undue leverage or be accorded wide latitude merely because of its supposed coveted status as a central agency,” the state told the court.
The government also said that the invocation of judicial jurisdiction by the ED seeking relief against the state is a matter of grave dismay and concern and that it interferes with the federal fabric of the polity and the Constitution. “The filing of such a proposal is in itself unwarranted, unfounded and completely unsustainable. Moreover, the reliefs sought are neither in accordance with the law nor justified,” the report said.
The state government said the existence of a predicate offense was essential for the ED to conduct an investigation under the PMLA, and the central agency had already conducted searches in several sand quarries and shipyards in Tamil Nadu without a corresponding predicate offence. “In the course of these illegal searches, ED claims to have collected some materials and records,” the state said.
The writ filed by the ED not only warrants a complete dismissal with exemplary costs, but the court must also take strict action against the agency for its conduct, the government said, alleging that the ED had harassed state government officials at various levels during its investigation into the sand mining issue based on four FIRs that were not even remotely related to the issue.
He said that on December 12, 2023, an ED officer made and forged the logo of the Tamil Nadu government on a letter pad and forced a water resources department official to sign the letter.
Checks and balances in place
The government said that there are checks and balances regarding river sand mining in the state, the entire sand quarry operation was done directly by the government and no permit, lease or license was given to any private operator. Contractors were employed only to extract sand from the riverbeds and transport it to the yards.
It also said that a strict approach was followed before granting approval for sand mining sites and the state government had set up a state-level monitoring committee, district-level task forces and taluk-level task forces to oversee the mining activities. Therefore, the police could not be expected to register an FIR mindlessly just because the ED shared some information, the state said.
Describing the ED as a “culprit” indulging in illegal searches and other such activities, the state said, “In the guise of sensational allegations, the rules of procedural justice can never be disregarded or tolerated under any circumstances. Merely because a speculative report has been made on the basis of an ED investigation, the same cannot be termed as a binding dictatorship on the state registry.”
After taking the status report on file, the division bench adjourned the hearing of the writ petition to December 16 as Special Public Prosecutor ED N. Ramesh sought time to file a rejoinder.
Published – 8 Dec 2025 21:56 IST
