Congress MPs to meet today as ED seals Young India office

New Delhi, Aug 04: The Congress MPs will meet on Thursday early morning at the Congress Parliamentary Party office to discuss the party's future strategy after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) temporarily sealed the Young India (YI) office over a case linked to the National Herald newspaper.

The Congress is also expected to give an adjournment motion notice in Parliament regarding the sealing of the Young India property.

The probe agency temporarily sealed the office space of Young Indian (YI) company in the premises of Congress-owned newspaper National Herald in Delhi as part of an ongoing money laundering investigation.

The seal was put in order to "preserve the evidence" which could not be collected as authorised representatives of YI were not present during the raids that were launched on Tuesday.

The National Herald newspaper is published by Associated Journals Ltd. (AJL) and its holding company is Young Indian. The newspaper office is registered in the name of AJL.

The agency recently carried out the high-profile questioning of Congress president Sonia Gandhi (in July) and her MP son Rahul Gandhi (in June) in this case at its headquarters in Delhi apart from that of Kharge and Bansal in April.

The Congress has said it gave a Rs 90 crore loan to an ailing AJL between 2001-02 and 2010-11 and later, in 2011, the shares of AJL were allotted to Young Indian and this debt was converted into equity and the loan was extinguished in the books of the AJL.

The ED claims these transactions attract anti-money laundering charges as a complex web of transactions and routing of funds were undertaken by the party and its leaders to acquire AJL's assets worth multiple crores of rupees.

The Gandhis are understood to have told the ED during their separate questioning sessions that no personal assets were made in the Congress-AJL-National Herald deal as Young Indian was a "not-for-profit" company established under section 25 of the Companies Act.