#JustIn: ED Raids 40+ Sites in Jharkhand, Bengal in Massive Coal Mafia Crackdown

The Enforcement Directorate executed one of its largest coordinated operations in recent years, descending on more than 40 premises across Jharkhand and West Bengal in the early hours of Friday as part of a high-stakes money-laundering probe into illegal coal trading and rigged tenders of Bharat Coking Coal Limited (BCCL). The raids, involving hundreds of officers backed by central armed police forces, targeted key operatives of an entrenched mafia network that has allegedly bled public-sector coal resources worth hundreds of crores through black-market sales and fraudulent outsourcing contracts.

In Dhanbad, the nerve centre of India’s coal belt, 18 locations were sealed before dawn. Among the primary targets were the sprawling office complex of Dev Prabha Company, a major BCCL outsourcing contractor, and the residences of its owner, LB Singh, and his brother Kumbh Nath Singh. Other prominent coal traders whose properties were searched include Anil Goyal, Sanjay Khemka, Binod Mahato, and Sunny Keshari. Officials have already confiscated large volumes of financial documents, digital storage devices, and records pointing to systematic irregularities in BCCL tender allotments and payments.

The most dramatic scenes unfolded at LB Singh’s fortified residence when ED officers arriving at 6 a.m. were met with snarling pet dogs allegedly set loose by the businessman to block entry. For nearly two hours, the raiding party was forced to negotiate from outside the gate while suspecting that crucial evidence was being destroyed inside. Entry was finally gained only after repeated appeals and the arrival of additional forces. Sources note that Singh has a controversial history: a decade ago, the CBI faced similar resistance during a raid on the same premises when he was accused of firing at officers investigating the identical BCCL tender scam.

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Simultaneously, the ED’s Kolkata zonal unit launched parallel searches at 24 locations across Durgapur, Purulia, Howrah, and Kolkata, focusing on beneficiaries and middlemen who allegedly laundered proceeds from the Jharkhand operations into real estate and shell companies in West Bengal. The cross-state synchronisation underscores the interstate character of the syndicate, which investigators claim used benami transactions and cash couriers to move illicit profits generated from stolen and illegally traded coal.

As the searches entered their second day, the Enforcement Directorate maintained official silence, but the sheer scale of deployment and the high-profile resistance encountered indicate that the agency is closing in on the top echelons of eastern India’s coal mafia, an organised crime network long shielded by political patronage and bureaucratic collusion.

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