White-collar and corporate governance lawyers advise how in-house counsel can be prepared when lawmen – namely the ED, CBI and tax officials – show up at the door. Indrajit Basu reports

ONa weekend morning earlier this year, teams from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrived simultaneously at the offices of a large Indian manufacturing company. The general counsel was overseas. By the time substitute counsel reached the premises, officers had already reviewed key financial records – unobserved, unchallenged and without the legal oversight that might have preserved important protections.

That episode, anonymised but representative, captures the reality of India’s current enforcement climate. Recent ED actions have extended across companies such as Merlin Group, Reliance Infrastructure and Reliance Power, Mantri Developers, entities linked to IDFC First Bank, and the Anas Group, while the long-running SRS and PACL matters continue to move through successive layers of investigation, attachment and litigation.

For corporate India, the question is no longer whether scrutiny will arrive, but whether the organisation is prepared when it does. While a full annual report for the 2025–26 fiscal year is yet to be released, in the final nine months of 2025 alone the ED initiated 620 new investigations into financial irregularities. This highlights a sustained high-intensity era of corporate oversight in India.

India’s major watchdogs – the ED, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the Income Tax Department, and Competition Commission of India – each follow their own rules but often end up chasing the same leads.

The lesson, reinforced across cases and sectors, is consistent: the most effective defence is not improvised at the door, it is built long before the door opens.

The architecture

In the high-stakes environment of Indian corporate enforcement, a company’s response architecture is not merely a policy manual, it is a critical structural defence that should be crafted long before an agency comes knocking. Given that enforcement bodies are increasingly employing “shock and awe” tactics – arriving at dawn and hitting multiple locations at once – relying on an individual is no longer safe.

Effective systems in place that have preselected office or branch staff assuming representative roles, and assuring that any conversations with investigators are funelled through the legal team, will ensure the best possible outcomes and also avoid so-called parallel (repeated) conversations between staff and agents, a recipe for confusion and detriment to the company.

That aside, modern raids are increasingly about imaging digital data. Abinash Pradhan, the lead of litigation and alternate dispute resolution at Wadia Ghandy & Co in Mumbai, says the first few hours dictate legal evidence for years. “A raided company must act as its own historian and log every action an officer takes, and every device that is copied.”

This internal record becomes a vital tool for lawyers to evaluate whether the search complied with law and provides a factual foundation for later challenges in the high court.

“The conduct of the first six hours decides the evidentiary record for the next six years,” says Pradhan. “Co-operation, in the sense of permitting lawful officers to exercise lawful powers, is non-negotiable, but co-operation is not the same as concession.”

This architecture ensures that later legal challenges, such as seeking the return of devices or the unfreezing of accounts, rest on a foundation of documented discipline rather than chaotic panic.

Rights and protections

Every enforcement agency derives its search and seizure powers from law, but those powers have limits. The Supreme Court’s landmark ruling, in Justice KS Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017), established privacy as a fundamental right. That ruling sets a boundary, says Tanya Ganguli, founder of TG Law Offices in New Delhi, a firm that focuses on corporate governance and white-collar matters. The judgment “does not prohibit searches, however it requires that they be reasonable, proportionate and conducted in accordance with the law,” says Ganguli. In other words, an agency can knock on your door – but it cannot do whatever it wants once inside.

However, when officers arrive, the immediate legal inventory is more extensive than most companies realise. The starting point is verification, says Sneha Jaisingh, partner and lead of the disputes practice group at Bharucha & Partners in Mumbai.

Setting out the threshold steps, Jaisingh says personnel on site “must also verify the identity and credentials of the officers to avoid impersonators, and they may ask the officers to identify themselves, produce the search authorisation, and disclose the relevant enforcement case information report or other reference details to the extent they are willing to disclose them in the course of the search. The onsite team must co-ordinate with management and external counsel offsite to verify these credentials.”