Acting Enforcement Directorate Chief Rahul Navin Appointed Full-Time Head

Acting Enforcement Directorate (ED) chief Rahul Navin has been appointed full-time director of the anti-money laundering agency.

An order issued by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) said the appointment of Mr Navin, a 1993-batch Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer of the Income Tax cadre, has been made "for a period of two years..."

The ED director is an Additional Secretary (AS) rank post in the Union government and Mr Navin was empanelled as an AS in December last year.

Mr Navin, 57, joined the ED in November, 2019 as a Special Director (OSD) to spearhead the agency's work on India's mutual evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global body that leads action against money laundering.

He is a BTech and an MTech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. He was appointed acting director of the ED after the tenure of his predecessor Sanjay Kumar Mishra ended in September 2023.

Considered close to Mr Mishra, Mr Navin's tenure as the ED head saw the high-profile arrests of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren in separate money laundering cases.

An expert in international taxation matters, Mr Navin belongs to Bihar and has worked in the I-T department for 30 years. During his stint in the international taxation wing from 2004-08, the I-T department raised demands on several offshore transactions including in the Vodafone case.

Mr Navin had rushed to West Bengal after an ED team was attacked in Sandeshkhali and had asked his investigators to "work without fear" and prepare a watertight case.

The IRS officer has authored various international taxation and transfer pricing journals and articles in the I-T department that are taught to trainee IRS officers at their alma mater, the National Academy of Direct Taxes (NADT) in Nagpur, Maharashtra.

The ED investigates financial crimes under two criminal laws -- the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act (FEOA) apart from the civil provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).