The Enforcement Directorate on Tuesday raided eight locations, including the premises of the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundations (OSF), in Bengaluru as part of its probe into alleged Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA)
contraventions.

Sources in the agency said the premises of entities linked to international human rights bodies were also searched. Soros, a Hungarian-American investor and philanthropist, is a bugbear of the Right wing in India.

The searches, sources said, were conducted after a preliminary probe revealed suspicious transactions of over ₹300 crore involving companies that had no apparent businesses but allegedly received funds from Soros’s firms in the name of providing consultancy.

An ED official said the OSF was put under the “prior reference category” by the Union home ministry in 2016, preventing it from giving unregulated donations to NGOs in India.

“It is alleged that to bypass this restriction, the OSF had subsidiaries in India and brought in funds in the form of FDI and consultancy fees and that money was used to fund activities of the NGOs, which is a FEMA violation,” the agency official said.

The funds, he said, were transferred through the automatic route for foreign direct investment (FDI) which does not require government approval before every transaction. The ED said it had identified around ₹300 crore in funding through this route since 2016, of which ₹25 crore had been disbursed to several NGOs and their employees.

During the Parliament session in December last year, the BJP had accused leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi of being in cahoots with “deep state” actors such as Soros in trying to “destabilise India”. The Congress had struck back by pointing to the “links” between Prime Minister Narendra Modi and industrialist Gautam Adani.