New Delhi: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday (July 8) reportedly “froze” several accounts held in private banks by the All India Trinamool Congress (AITC). This follows searches conducted by the central agency at five premises in West Bengal a day earlier.The party reportedly holds Rs 440.42 crore in three bank accounts that the ED has said will be frozen under Section 17 (1-A) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).The ongoing action is related to alleged routing of “suspected funds” through the party’s accounts. The premises searched were associated with the Carewell Group of Companies, which operates in the aviation sector.The Wire reported on Tuesday (July 7) that, so far, the “investigation has revealed that approximately Rs 160 crore was transferred from AITC accounts to Carewell Aviation India Pvt. Ltd. and its related entity between April 2023 and June 2026.”As per the agency, Carewell Aviation Pvt. Ltd. further routed an amount of Rs 82.96 crore, over 2023–26, to another newly incorporated related entity.These searches were the first instance of the investigative agency – a branch of the Union finance ministry – entering a probe directly related to a political party’s expenditures, made from its own accounts.Investigators allege that the transferred funds were used to purchase an Embraer Legacy 600 Aircraft and an Agusta 109 SP helicopter, apparently at a cost of Rs 112 crore.The Legacy 600 Embraer and Agusta helicopter were rented out to the AITC itself, despite having been purchased from the party’s own corpus.An ED officer said, “These transactions appear dubious [and designed] to conceal the actual beneficiary of the funds”.ED investigations rest on the PMLA, 2002, whose basis is a prior complaint listed as a “scheduled offence” in the 2002 law. So far, the scheduled offence in this case is unknown.There is no official statement yet from the AITC or the investigation agency.Update at 8:22 pm: The AITC issued an official statement on the issue on July 8, 2026, calling the ED actions “politically motivated“. Earlier in the evening, ED issued a statement on the raids, which confirm the actions on Carewell Aviation and freezing of AITC accounts held with a private bank. It also provides basic details about the “scheduled offence”.