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The Tamil Nadu police and the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) found themselves at loggerheads before the Madras High Court on Friday (October 31, 2025) over the issue of registering First Information Reports (FIRs) on the basis of information shared by the ED with the jurisdictional police. Appearing before the first Division Bench of Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G. Arul Murugan, Advocate General P.S. Raman and ED special public prosecutor N. Ramesh had a heated argument before the court adjourned the matter by three weeks for filing a counter affidavit. The ED had filed a writ petition seeking a direction to the Tamil Nadu Director General of Police/Head of Police Force to register a FIR on the basis of information shared by it on June 13, 2024 with regard to a large scale scam in mining of river sand, worth crores of rupees, across the State. Mr. Ramesh told the court that the information was shared with the State police in accordance with Section 66(2) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of 2002 which requires the ED to share information in its possession with the other agencies concerned for necessary action. Section 66(2) had been introduced to the 2002 Act by way of an amendment in 2018 and the Supreme Court in the famous Vijay Madanlal Choudhary’s case (related to PMLA) had in 2022 observed that the police would be “obliged” to register FIRs on the basis of the information share by the ED, the SPP said. Countering the submissions, the A-G told the Division Bench the Supreme Court had also ruled that if the police refuses to register a FIR for any reason whatsoever, the aggrieved party could only file a private complaint before the jurisdictional judicial magistrate and not a writ petition before the High Court. “My learned friend (Mr. Ramesh) is wrong in saying that we have to register a FIR just because they (ED) are sharing information with us... And that they have sent the information does not mean I should immediately register it like a post office. Only, I will take a call on registering a FIR or not,” the A-G said. When the SPP said, “it was a not a matter of ego but a huge scam,” the A-G retorted: “My learned friend says that there’s a big scam and so on. There are scams happening all over India but the eyes of the Enforcement Directorate is only on Tamil Nadu, nowhere else.” Contending the Tamil Nadu government had collected statistics, the A-G said: “Some four or five times more number of sand mining cases are pending in Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and Bihar. Has the ED taken action against any of them? There are other things at play here.” On the SPP’s contention that the information collected by the ED should not go waste especially when the matters involves public interest, the AG said: “Speaking as the Advocate General of the State, representing my government, we are very apprehensive whenever the ED pokes its nose into our business.” Mr. Raman informed the court a Division Bench of Justices M.S. Ramesh and Sunder Mohan had on July 16, 2024 restrained the ED from proceeding against certain individuals against whom it had registered a Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) regarding the alleged sand mining scam. Though that order was taken on appeal, the Supreme Court dismissed the ED’s special leave petition on September 23, 2025. He also said, the ED had summoned many district Collectors in the State for inquiry with respect to the same ECIR booked on charges of a scam in sand mining. “If I register a FIR now, the next thing they will do is to arrest the Collectors in Tamil Nadu,” the A-G said and highlighted that the ED had recently withdrawn a similar writ petition filed before the Supreme Court seeking a direction to the Delhi government to register a FIR on the basis of information share by it.
