New Delhi: In the Axis Mutual Fund money laundering case, the Enforcement Directorate on Sunday said it has seized Rs 17.4 crore of shares and mutual funds and arrested its then fund manager Viresh Joshi. A special court has remanded Joshi to ED custody till Aug 8.The proceeds of crime identified by the agency so far are around Rs 200 crore, and likely to further go up substantially. “The proceeds of the fraud were laundered through multiple shell entities and bank accounts beneficially owned by the accused persons/entities and their family members, which is under investigation,” ED said.The current searches at the Axis Mutual Fund — which is one of the country’s largest MF with more than Rs 3 lakh crore of assets under management and having a 1.3 crore investors’ folio count under its various schemes (as of March 2025) — has raised serious concerns on the funds’ safety of lakhs of investors.Over the last two days, the agency conducted searches across eight cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Gurgaon, Ludhiana, Ahmedabad, Bhavnagar, Bhuj and Kolkata — on several front entities that have been allegedly involved in rigging the market on insider trade information shared by Joshi.ED said searches are part of an ongoing investigation into the illegal profits made by certain entities/persons by indulging in front-running trade activities in scrips traded by Axis Mutual Fund during 2018 to 2021.The probe has also revealed that “the accused had utilised a terminal in Dubai to punch the front running trade orders through mule trading accounts obtained from various brokers”.In addition to accused Joshi, investigation has revealed that many other traders/brokers had also misused the advance inputs on Axis Mutual Fund trades and indulged in front running to generate illicit trade profits, which is nothing but proceeds of crime, ED said.
