Who is Rahul Navin, IRS officer appointed as new ED director?

Acting Enforcement Directorate (ED) chief Rahul Navin was on Wednesday appointed as the full-time director of the federal anti-money laundering agency.

An order issued by the Appointments Committee of the Cabinet (ACC) said the appointment of Navin, a 1993-batch Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer of the Income Tax cadre, has been made "for a period of two years from the date of assumption of charge of the post, or until further orders, whichever is earlier".

The ED director is an Additional Secretary (AS) rank post in the Union government and Navin was empanelled as an AS in December last year.

Navin, 57, joined the ED in November, 2019 as a Special Director (OSD) to spearhead the agency's work with regard to India's mutual evaluation by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global body that leads action against money laundering.

A B. Tech and an M. Tech from IIT Kanpur and an MBA from the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Navin was appointed as the acting director of the ED after the tenure of his predecessor Sanjay Kumar Mishra came to an end on September 15 last year.

Considered close to Mishra, Navin's tenure as the ED head saw the high profile arrests of Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren in separate money laundering cases.

An expert in international taxation matters, Navin belongs to Bihar and has worked in the I-T Department for 30 years. During his stint in the international taxation wing during 2004-08, the I-T department raised demands on several offshore transactions including in the Vodafone case.

Navin had rushed to West Bengal after an ED team was attacked in Sandeshkhali and had asked his investigators to "work without fear" and prepare a watertight case.

A senior ED officer told PTI that Navin ensured that the agency teams get "complete" protection of armed personnel and that its offices also got security from paramilitary forces.

"He has directed the agency to ensure timely filing of charge sheets in all the cases being investigated under the anti-money laundering law and others. The ED got three conviction orders against 24 accused in the last one month," he said.

The IRS officer has authored various international taxation and transfer pricing journals and articles in the I-T department that are taught to trainee IRS officers at their alma mater, the National Academy of Direct Taxes (NADT) in Nagpur, Maharashtra.

He has also authored a guiding book titled "Information Exchange and Tax Transparency: Tackling Global Tax Evasion and Avoidance" which was published in 2017.

The book came from his experience of attending numerous internal bi-lateral and multi-lateral economic and anti-tax evasion platforms like OECD, the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information and the G20.

The ED investigates financial crimes under two criminal laws-- the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act (FEOA) apart from the civil provisions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA).

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DNA staff and is published from PTI)

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