The latest attachment, ordered by the directorate under Section 5 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), covers nine immovable properties and balances in bank accounts held in the names of Laxman Paul and his wife Jhuma Dey Paul. The figure of about Rs 1.05 crore is provisional and reflects the directorate's working valuation of the assets on the date of the order, not a final adjudication. It is the second provisional attachment in the same investigation, and brings the cumulative proceeds of crime attached in the case to roughly Rs 2.43 crore across both orders.
The case itself dates to an FIR registered at the Amtali Police Station against Prasenjit Paul and Laxman Paul under provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Tripura Gambling Act, 1926. The directorate's account, as reported by the source, traces the alleged syndicate through that FIR and through a search conducted by Tripura Police at Prasenjit Paul's residence on 11 May 2023, where officers recovered Rs 93 lakh in cash, a laptop, mobile phones, four debit cards and 17 notebooks containing what the directorate describes as betting-transaction entries. Those notebooks are the documentary spine of the ED case; the bank-account attachments flow from them.
The two Pauls and their associates are alleged by the directorate to have operated an organised illegal betting syndicate covering IPL matches and other cricket fixtures. The syndicate, as the ED has described it in earlier orders, accepted wagers from a network of punters in Tripura, settled the books during and after each match, and routed the proceeds through bank accounts and cash transactions that the cash search at Prasenjit Paul's residence in May 2023 first put on the agency's map. The directorate's allegation is that the immovable properties attached in both orders represent the placement of those proceeds — that is, the conversion of cash winnings into land and buildings in the names of family members.
What the latest order actually covers
The August 2026 attachment order lists nine immovable properties. The directorate has, in this order, named Laxman Paul and his wife Jhuma Dey Paul as the holders of record. The attached land includes agricultural parcels and a residential plot in West Tripura, plus a property in Kolkata, West Bengal. The ED account, as reported by the source, says the properties were purchased predominantly with cash, which is the predicate finding that allows the directorate to treat them as proceeds of crime under the PMLA rather than as legitimately acquired assets.
Alongside the nine properties, the order attaches balances in bank accounts held in the names of Laxman Paul and Jhuma Dey Paul. The bank-balance component of an attachment order is mechanically simpler than the immovable-property component — once the order is confirmed, the banks place a lien on the named accounts and no withdrawals can be made without the directorate's consent — but it has the same legal effect for the duration of any subsequent trial. The combined value of the immovable properties and the frozen balances is what the directorate has provisionally assessed at Rs 1.05 crore.
How the case progressed to a second order
This is the second provisional attachment in the case. The first order, dated 16 March 2026, covered properties and bank balances held in the names of Prasenjit Paul and his mother. That earlier order ran the directorate's case through the formal attachment process for the first time and gave the agency a test run at the Adjudicating Authority under the PMLA. The August 2026 order extends the same machinery to a wider circle of family members holding assets that the directorate alleges were acquired with the proceeds of the same betting operation.
The sequence of orders matters because each provisional attachment is time-bound. Under Section 5 of the PMLA, the directorate has ninety days from the date of a provisional attachment order to confirm it before the Adjudicating Authority. If confirmation is not sought or obtained within that window, the attachment lapses. The August 2026 order is fresh enough that confirmation proceedings are only just beginning, but the source notes that the investigation itself is in progress, which is the agency's standard formulation when further attachments remain a possibility.
The Rs 93 lakh cash seizure that started it
The single largest piece of physical evidence in the case is the Rs 93 lakh in cash recovered from Prasenjit Paul's residence on 11 May 2023. That seizure, conducted by Tripura Police and later adopted by the ED into its predicate offence schedule, is what converted what was a state-level criminal case under the Tripura Gambling Act into a money-laundering investigation under the PMLA. The PMLA attaches only to a schedule of predicate offences, and the IPC sections under which the Pauls were initially named, combined with the Tripura Gambling Act, were the predicate the ED used to register its own case.
The 17 notebooks found alongside the cash are the second pillar of the agency's case. According to the source, those notebooks contained betting-transaction entries — running lists of wagers placed on IPL and other cricket matches, with the names of punters, the amounts staked, the selections backed and the settlement figures. Notebooks like these are treated by the ED as primary documentary evidence in a PMLA case because they establish the volume of the betting operation, the identity of the participants and the cash flow that fed the alleged proceeds of crime. Once the cash and the notebooks were in the case file, the path from the May 2023 search to the August 2026 attachment was a matter of tracing, valuation and formal order.
Why the cash-to-land trail matters under PMLA
Indian money-laundering law turns on the link between a predicate offence and the assets held by the accused. The directorate's case, as laid out in the attachment orders, is that the immovable properties attached under both the March and August orders were purchased predominantly with cash drawn from the proceeds of the betting operation. That characterisation, if upheld by the Adjudicating Authority and eventually by the relevant appellate forums, converts what would otherwise be family-held property into attachable proceeds of crime.
The directorate's account of the cash purchases is also why the August order reaches assets held in the names of Laxman Paul and his wife rather than just Prasenjit Paul. Under the PMLA, the directorate can attach assets held by any person where it can demonstrate that those assets represent the proceeds of a scheduled offence — the holder of the property does not have to be the offender named in the predicate FIR. The naming of Jhuma Dey Paul in the order is consistent with that pattern: the ED's allegation is that assets in her name were acquired with cash from the same syndicate, even though she is not herself named as an accused in the underlying FIR.
What the Rs 2.43 crore running total covers
The directorate has now provisionally attached approximately Rs 2.43 crore in proceeds of crime across both orders in this case. The first order (16 March 2026) covered properties and balances in the names of Prasenjit Paul and his mother; the second order (August 2026) covers nine properties and bank balances in the names of Laxman Paul and his wife. Cash, properties and bank balances are all counted in that total — the Rs 93 lakh recovered in May 2023 sits inside the Rs 2.43 crore figure, because the ED routinely folds seized cash into the cumulative proceeds-of-crime arithmetic once a case is registered.
The figure is provisional. Adjudicating Authority confirmation, potential appeals and any eventual trial will determine the final attached amount. The directorate can also issue further attachment orders in the same case if the investigation surfaces additional assets — the source notes that the ED investigation remains in progress, which is the formulation the agency uses when further action is still on the table.
What happens next in the case
Two procedural clocks start with the August 2026 order. The first is the ninety-day window for the ED to confirm the provisional attachment before the Adjudicating Authority under the PMLA. The second is the longer-running trial track for the predicate offences under the IPC and the Tripura Gambling Act, which sits with the criminal courts in Tripura. The PMLA confirmation and the underlying criminal trial are technically independent — the Adjudicating Authority can confirm an attachment even if the criminal trial is ongoing — but in practice the strength of the ED's case turns on the predicate.
The next filing to watch is the ED's confirmation petition before the Adjudicating Authority. Confirmation is the point at which the attachment becomes more than provisional — the immovable properties cannot be sold or transferred, and the bank accounts remain frozen, until the authority rules. The source did not name a date for the confirmation hearing. For the IPL calendar, the relevance of the case is indirect: the betting it relates to is not an IPL-internal matter, and the IPL as a tournament has no role in the proceedings. The case is filed, however, in the same criminal-law framework that governs illegal betting on the league across India, and the wider enforcement picture — including the ED's standing instructions to state police on betting-linked money flows — is the lens through which the attachment is being read by the betting-risk desks at the major sports books and by the compliance teams inside the league's franchise system.
For readers tracking the cricket calendar itself, the working assumption is that the season proceeds without direct procedural interruption from this case. The IPL fixture list, the team squads and the broadcast schedule sit on a separate administrative track, and there is no mechanism by which the ED order can affect the competition. The case matters for the editorial desk because it sits inside the broader story of illegal betting on the league, and the cumulative attachment figure — Rs 2.43 crore across two orders — is the clearest public indicator of the scale of the alleged operation that the directorate has been able to substantiate to date. The Match Centre coverage of every fixture continues in parallel.