Introduction
In common usage, a "raid" refers to a sudden, unannounced visit by an investigating agency to search premises, seize records or property, and sometimes make an arrest, all without advance notice to the person or company concerned. It is not a term defined anywhere in the PMLA itself; the statute speaks only of "search" and "seizure" under Section 17 and "arrest" under Section 19. But the colloquial label captures something real about the experience: a raid is designed to be sudden, and the law deliberately does not require the agency to warn the person being searched.
The Enforcement Directorate's power of search and seizure under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 ("PMLA") is among the least understood and most consequential tools in India's economic offences framework. A search requires neither a prior FIR nor a magistrate's warrant — it proceeds on the officer's recorded "reason to believe" resting on material before the officer, not mere suspicion. The exposure is real: per the ED's FY 2025-26 annual report, Enforcement Case Information Reports ("ECIRs"), which typically precede a raid, rose roughly 39% to 1,080, even as arrests fell about 27% to 156. Searches are growing more frequent even as the agency is, by its own account, more selective about whom it then arrests.
Statutory Basis and the Limits of Judicial Review
Section 17 empowers an authorised officer to search and seize where there is recorded reason to believe a person holds proceeds of crime or related records; Section 19 confers a parallel arrest power on the same standard. Neither requires disclosure of those reasons at the time. Both were upheld as constitutional in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India, which held ED officers are not "police officers" and need not furnish the ECIR to the person searched — though the judgment is now under review before a differently constituted bench. Its effect is that judicial scrutiny of a search is confined to procedural compliance, not the reasons' sufficiency on the merits.
The maxim ubi jus ibi remedium therefore operates narrowly here: the remedy lies not in resisting the search, but in the avenues courts have since carved out afterward.
The Sequence of a Search
Officers arrive unannounced, produce identification and a signed authorisation, and state the provisions invoked, without disclosing the underlying reasons. Every item seized is recorded in a panchnama, a contemporaneous inventory, ordinarily before independent witnesses. The company's representative should stay present throughout, verify the panchnama line by line before signing, and obtain a copy; a refusal to sign should be noted, not compelled.
If an arrest follows, Pankaj Bansal v. Union of India requires that grounds of arrest be furnished in writing as a matter of course — an oral recitation no longer suffices — and Tarsem Lal v. Directorate of Enforcement holds that once a Special Court takes cognisance of a complaint, the ED loses its Section 19 arrest power over the named accused, who instead falls under the Court's ordinary summons jurisdiction. Together these confine what had appeared, after Vijay Madanlal, to be an almost unbounded arrest power.
Rights and Conduct During the Search
Officers may use Section 50 to summon individuals and record statements. Such statements are not, at that stage, ordinarily treated as those of an "accused" under Article 20(3), so nemo tenetur se ipsum accusare applies less strictly than at trial — but employees should confine themselves to facts within personal knowledge and avoid interpreting transactions without legal advice. Privilege should be asserted in writing at the point of seizure, not argued later, and nothing should be concealed or destroyed once officers arrive.
Do: state facts within personal knowledge, plainly and without elaboration; say "I don't know" where that is the truth; read any document fully before signing it; raise privilege claims immediately, in writing, at the point of seizure; log every device accessed or seized.
Do not: speculate or answer outside personal knowledge; interpret transactions merely to appear cooperative; coordinate answers with colleagues; conceal, alter, or destroy any document or device; sign anything not verified line by line.
Searches now routinely reach laptops, phones, and cloud storage; the company should log every device touched and ensure electronic copying is reflected in the panchnama, mindful of its obligations under the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. On seized material, Sarla Gupta v. Directorate of Enforcement holds that a person searched is entitled to true copies of everything seized — relied upon or not — and may compel production of un-relied material at the bail stage under Section 94 BNSS, giving effect to audi alteram partem. A search cannot ordinarily be obstructed, but recourse remains afterward: procedural challenges, directions on retained property, contesting an arrest, or objections before the Special Court.
The First 24 Hours
The task immediately after a raid is containment, not messaging. A workable 24-hour checklist: convene a small response team of outside PMLA counsel, in-house legal, IT, and one senior executive; take forensic backups of surviving systems and place a litigation hold on related records; cross-verify the panchnama against what was actually removed; flag privileged or irrelevant seized items in writing, without delay; brief the board and keep minutes; if listed or regulated, ask counsel whether the raid is a disclosable event; and route any public statement through counsel before release, not after.
Conclusion
Read together, Vijay Madanlal, Pankaj Bansal, Tarsem Lal, and Sarla Gupta show that the ED's powers remain wide but are no longer free of procedural discipline. Each judgment closes a different gap: Vijay Madanlal settled the constitutional architecture but left the sufficiency of a search's reasons outside judicial reach; Pankaj Bansal forced written grounds of arrest where oral recitation once sufficed; Tarsem Lal drew a hard line around the ED's arrest power once a Special Court takes cognisance; and Sarla Gupta gave the searched party a genuine right to the material taken from its own premises. None of these cases curtails the ED's power to search in the first place — that threshold remains, by design, almost entirely insulated from challenge. What they curtail, instead, is everything that follows a search: how an arrest is justified, when it can happen at all, and what a company is entitled to see once its documents are gone.
A raid is disorienting by design, and that disorientation is itself a kind of pressure — on employees to over-explain, on executives to respond publicly before thinking, on IT teams to act defensively in ways that can look, in hindsight, like concealment. None of that is inevitable. The company's real protection lies not in resisting the search at the threshold, which the law does not permit and which carries independent criminal exposure of its own, but in a workforce and legal team that have already rehearsed the moment before it arrives — that know, calmly and in advance, where lawful cooperation ends and the surrender of a right begins. Preparedness of this kind is not a legal luxury; it is what separates a difficult day from a lasting exposure. The company that has briefed its people, rehearsed its response, and settled these questions before the knock on the door is the one that comes through a search with its rights, its record, and its credibility still intact.