Days after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) arrested AAP leader and minister Sanjeev Arora over money laundering charges, it issued a summons for Basant Garg IAS, the CMD of the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PSPCL) over his links to the money laundering case.
In addition to Garg, Hemant Sood and Chander Shekhar Agarwal have also been summoned by the ED under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) at its Delhi HIU office on Monday.
ED summons PSPCL CMD Basant Garg, Director H K Trehan, others in PMLA case against Punjab minister Sanjeev Arora: Officials
— Press Trust of India (@PTI_News) May 16, 2026
Both Sood and Agarwal are bookies, said to be close associates of Arora. The PSPCL's Director (Commercial), Harsharan Kaur Trehan, was the fourth person to receive the ED summons for Monday.
The ED case concerns a private company linked to Arora, which allegedly benefited by illegally returning a bank guarantee worth crores of rupees amid the development of the 40-acre Hampton Court Business Park project in Ludhiana, an Indian Express report said.
Back in 2023, when Sanjeev Arora had been a Rajya Sabha MP, Ritesh Properties and Industries Limited (RPIL)—the company now under the ED scanner—had applied to Powercom to increase the load capacity of electricity, for which it had deposited a bank guarantee of Rs 1.97 crore, set to expire only in 2028.
Two years later, in 2025, RPIL had again filed a Powercom application to change the voltage supply of electricity. This was said to be around the time that Arora became the Power Minister in the Bhagwant Mann government.
However, Powercom had stated that the old bank guarantee—which needed to be returned to file a new electricity application—could only be returned when the company deposited a new guarantee of Rs 1.87 crore.
Yet, after the RPIL's February 2 letter to Powercom asking for the old bank guarantee, the PSPCL reportedly returned the Rs 1.97 crore guarantee the very next day, without the submission of a new guarantee, which had led to backlash from Powercom's engineers.
It was after the backlash that RPIL forked over a new bank guarantee a month later—on April 6.
In that regard, the ongoing ED case continues to probe how this illegal benefit was given to the company at a time when Arora had been serving as the Power Minister.
