TASMAC versus ED case: Madras High Court dismisses pleas against search and seizure operation

Madras High Court dismisses Tamil Nadu government and TASMAC petitions challenging ED search operation legality.

The Madras High Court on Wednesday (April 23, 2025) dismissed writ petitions filed by the Tamil Nadu government as well as Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) to declare as illegal a search and seizure operation carried out by the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) at the corporation’s headquarters in Chennai between March 6 and 8, 2025.

A Division Bench of Justices S.M. Subramaniam and K. Rajasekar held that the sufficiency of reasons for conduct the search operation at the TASMAC headquarters, on the basis of several First Information Reports (FIRs) for the predicate offence of corruption registered by the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti Corruption (DVAC), could not be gone into in the preliminary stage of investigation.

They also said that courts could not go into the allegations of political motives behind the act of the ED. They said that it was necessary to allow the ED to probe into money laundering charges since economic offences were against the interests of the citizens and said that the latter would be the best judge to decide whether there was any political motive behind these actions.

On March 19, 2025, TASMAC had filed two writ petitions - one to declare the search and seizure operation as illegal and the other seeking a direction to the ED to not harass the TASMAC employees in the guise of investigation. Apart from these two writ petitions, the Tamil Nadu government and TASMAC had jointly filed a third writ petition too.

The joint writ petition sought a declaration that the conduct of such searches by the ED, without the consent of the State government, was in violation of the principle of federalism. It insisted that the central agency must not be permitted to carry out any investigation regarding money laundering offences in Tamil Nadu without the State government’s nod.

When the three writ petitions were listed for admission before a Division Bench of Justices M.S. Ramesh and N. Senthilkumar on March 20, 2025, the judges wondered how the joint writ petition seeking an omnibus direction could be issued. Immediately, the government agreed to amend its prayer and urged the court to order notices in TASMAC’s writ petitions.

After doing so, Justices Ramesh and Senthilkumar recused from hearing the cases on March 25, 2025. Later, when the matters were listed before the alternative bench of Justices Subramaniam and Rajasekar, the government filed an amendment petition to alter the prayer in the joint writ petition and sought a series of six different reliefs.