ED flags Rs 60 crore gaps at TMC MP Nadimul Haque’s Urdu daily

The Enforcement Directorate said on 8 September that searches lasting more than 24 hours had turned up alleged financial irregularities of about Rs 60 crore at an Urdu newspaper linked to Trinamool Congress Rajya Sabha member Nadimul Haque. Teams reached seven premises in Kolkata, Ranchi and New Delhi around 6.30 a.m. on 7 September. They left the Park Circus office of Akhbar-e-Mashriq in the early hours of Tuesday with documents and digital copies.

Haque is a journalist and businessman and a director of the company that publishes the multi-edition daily. He was in Ranchi on Monday with the Parliamentary Committee on Government Assurances. Officials brought him back to Kolkata by car and questioned him at his office and at his Darga Road residence. No arrest was announced.

An ED official told PTI, speaking without name, that financial records and digital files were being examined to establish the trail and the source of the funds. Sources said investigators could not find satisfactory supporting papers for transactions near Rs 60 crore. They also said the agency is looking at whether money linked to the Trinamool Congress moved through the media company, and whether hawala channels were used.

Times of India reporting on Tuesday went further on the crypto file. Sources there said investigators were looking at more than 300 Bitcoin movements, including transfers of 307 bitcoins to private wallets, and a Rs 1.5 crore cash entry without matching physical cash. Those figures have not been put in an ED press note. They sit in the same case file as the newspaper books and should be treated as an investigative lead, not a court finding.

The predicate case is an FIR from the Bidhannagar Police Commissionerate on alleged illegal cash transactions and funding from unknown sources. The ED registered an ECIR on that FIR and used it to search. That is the normal PMLA sequence. What is new on 8 September is the size of the unexplained slice the agency is now willing to put in briefings: Rs 60 crore, seven addresses, one sitting MP, one Urdu daily.

Akhbar-e-Mashriq is not a pamphlet. It is a commercial paper with editions and a registered office in central Kolkata. Media companies in India often mix advertising, political printing and family shareholding. That mix is legal until the books fail a money-laundering test. The ED's present claim is that a large block of entries has no matching invoices, contracts or cash. Haque, sources said, did not give an account the officers accepted on the spot.

The political frame is obvious and should be stated without embroidery. The Trinamool Congress runs West Bengal. The ED has spent years on party-linked files. Haque is not a cabinet minister. He is a Rajya Sabha member with a newspaper. The agency has not charged him. TMC has not issued a detailed rebuttal of the Rs 60 crore figure in the copy available on Tuesday evening. Both of those facts can change this week.

What a reader can take away now is the geometry of the case. Seven premises. Twenty-four hours. A Bidhannagar FIR underneath a PMLA ECIR. A named daily. A named MP. A rupee figure attached to missing papers, and a separate crypto trail that officials have described only through sources. The next public document that matters is either a chargesheet, a provisional attachment, or a statement from Haque that answers the Rs 60 crore gap line by line.