New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Thursday carried out raids at the premises of AAP leader Durgesh Pathak in Delhi, an act that the Aam Aadmi Party said was politically motivated.
A team of the CBI’s Anti Corruption Branch from Delhi reached Pathak’s residence in Rajinder Nagar area of the national capital.
The development comes three days after the CBI registered a case under Section 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code and the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) against Pathak, and another AAP office bearer Kapil Bhardwaj and other private persons.
In May last year, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) had directed the CBI to carry out a probe under provisions of the FCRA.
Condemning the CBI action, the AAP alleged that Pathak has faced the action because of his elevation as the party’s poll in-charge for Gujarat elections.
The CBI, former Delhi chief minister Atishi alleged, sprung into action as soon as the AAP started preparations for the 2027 Gujarat polls. Former deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia commented that the CBI action was a fallout of the BJP’s realisation that the AAP has emerged as a formidable challenge in Gujarat.
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How Pathak came under lens
In October 2022, the Enforcement Directorate had informed the MHA about possible violation of the FCRA provisions by the AAP after searches at the premises of Sukhpal Singh Khaira in connection with a case of a drug cartel operating from Punjab.
Khaira had quit the Congress in 2015 to join the Aam Aadmi Party only to return to his parent party in 2021.
During the raid at Khaira’s premise, the ED is said to have come across four pages containing a “list of donors in the US” and eight handwritten pages of a diary that allegedly led ED with a clue to foreign funding amounting to $1,19,000.
Khaira, according to the ED, revealed that the funds were raised through campaigns in the US in April-May 2016 before the 2017 Punjab elections.
Subsequently, Pankaj Gupta, the then AAP national secretary, allegedly admitted to having received donations from foreign nationals. He submitted data of donations received during the period between 2014 and 2020.
The ED is said to have come across an Excel sheet, ‘Volunteers of AAP,’ from the email dump of AAP volunteer Aniket Saxena in June 2022.
This Excel sheet, the ED informed the MHA, contained names of 46 individuals, their citizenship, mobile numbers as well as their donations. Thirty-five are mentioned as ‘Canadian’ and the remaining as ‘Indian’, the agency alleged.
In its analysis, the ED allegedly found at least 19 of the donors on the list submitted by Gupta were Canadian nationals.
Saxena allegedly was asked to transfer $29,000 generated from fundraising events in 2016 directly to the accounts of Pathak and Bhardwaj. The AAP, the ED submitted, raised 15,000 Canadian dollars through a fundraising event, attended by Pathak, in Toronto in November 2015.
The list containing names of all donors was shared by volunteers in Canada but the party deliberately concealed their names in official records and manipulated them, according to the CBI FIR.
Another event in January 2016 generated $ 11,786 in funds of which $7,965 were allegedly transferred to the party’s IDBI account using the passport details of 11 party volunteers while the donations were claimed to be received by more than 200 persons.
The MHA asked the ED to continue investigating in October 2022, and the agency submitted the summary of its investigation on 13 May 2024.
“…it is likely that donors as mentioned in Annexure-V annexed with this letter are foreign nationals, and that AAP has concealed their nationality and names of these Canadian nationals intentionally by changing their names and Passport numbers in order to hide the fact that these donors are foreign nationals, as receiving donations from foreign nationals amounts to violation of Section 3 of FCRA, 2010 and Section 29B of Representation of People Act, 1951,” the ED had submitted to the MHA.
Based on ED’s findings, the MHA handed over the probe to the CBI—the competent authority to probe the FCRA violations.
“A prima facie case of violation of section 3 of the FCRA is made out as the AAP has received foreign contribution from a foreign source which is specifically prohibited under Section 3(1)(e) of the FCRA and is an offence under Section 35,” the MHA wrote in its order to the CBI.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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