Did FIITJEE Collect Fees For Courses It Could Not Deliver, And Where Did The Money Go?

Directorate of Enforcement Lucknow Zonal Office filed a Prosecution Complaint on 15.10.2026 before the Special PMLA Court, Ghaziabad, against M/s FIITJEE Limited and its Directors, Dinesh Kumar Goel and Monila Goel, for the offence of money laundering related to the misappropriation of fees collected from students. ED has sought their conviction and the confiscation of properties worth Rs. 71.88 Crore seized and provisionally attached during the investigation.

The investigation was initiated on the basis of four FIRs registered by UP Police at Noida and Greater Noida and by MP Police at Bhopal under Sections 316(2), 318(4), 61(2) and 3(5) of BNS, 2023, corresponding to Sections 406, 420, 120B and 34 of IPC, 1860. The underlying narrative is straightforward and devastating. FIITJEE collected advance fees ranging from Rs. 2.8 Lakh to Rs. 3.5 Lakh per student for programmes lasting two to four years.

The company assured uninterrupted coaching through the full period, including programmes scheduled to continue until March 2029. Faculty members then left because their salaries were not paid. Centres closed abruptly without notice. Students who had already paid were left without the instruction they had purchased.

Investigation has revealed that FIITJEE abruptly closed 32 centres between May 2024 and February 2025, leaving 14,411 enrolled students without the coaching they had paid for. The company continued to admit students, even for programmes running up to March 2029, although it knew it could not deliver them. The fees so collected were spent while the company was in continuous deficit. That portion of the fees that has been retained and misappropriated, quantified at Rs. 85.79 Crore, has been determined as the Proceeds of Crime in this case.

That figure of 14,411 enrolled students alone requires more than a moment’s reflection. Each of those 14,411 young people had entered a multi-year commitment at a formative stage of their academic lives. Their families had calculated the cost against the hope of admission to the Indian Institutes of Technology or other premier engineering institutions. The money left household budgets and entered the company’s accounts. The teaching that was supposed to follow never materialised for large numbers of them. What did materialise was a sudden void in preparation time that cannot be recovered by a simple refund, even if one were eventually ordered.

Further investigation has revealed that Dinesh Kumar Goel and Monila Goel, who controlled the company, took Rs. 24.92 Crore as salary from FY 2022-23 onwards. Dinesh Kumar Goel drew about Rs. 56 Lakh a month. Monila Goel drew more than Rs. 25 Lakh a month, though she admitted that she did not attend office regularly and only signed cheques from home.

Payments to her continued even when the centres were closing. The Goel family held 86.31 percent of the shares, a concentration that allowed the directors to approve their own remuneration. Meanwhile the employees who actually stood in classrooms and delivered the core service of the business went unpaid or faced repeated delays. The contrast is not subtle. It is structural.

It is pertinent to mention that the ED had earlier conducted searches at 07 premises on 24.04.2025, seizing cash of Rs. 10 Lakh and jewellery worth Rs. 4.86 Crore, and provisionally attached properties worth Rs. 66.92 Crore on 09.10.2026 under the provisions of PMLA, 2002. Adding the earlier seizures produces the Rs. 71.88 Crore figure now sought for confiscation. The arithmetic is clean. The human arithmetic is not. Confiscation to the Central Government does not automatically translate into reimbursement for the families who paid the fees. The legal pathway from attached assets to student relief remains a separate and still unresolved process.

The advance-fee model itself sits at the heart of the difficulty. A student pays several lakh rupees at the beginning of a programme that will run for two, three or four years. The cash arrives immediately. The obligation to teach stretches far into the future. When that cash is spent on current costs, or on director remuneration, while the future teaching capacity is allowed to erode, the liability does not disappear. It merely shifts onto the students and their families. The company continued to admit new students even after it knew that it could not deliver the programmes. Fees collected under those conditions became the very funds later quantified as proceeds of crime at Rs. 85.79 Crore.

Fourteen thousand four hundred eleven students did not simply lose a commercial service. They lost months and in many cases years of structured preparation for one of the most competitive examinations in the country. Replacement coaching, when available, comes at additional cost and often at a later stage when the academic calendar has already advanced. Teachers who left because of unpaid salaries carried their own financial injuries. Landlords of the closed centres carried unpaid rent. The cascade of consequences radiates outward from the original fee receipts.

The Rs. 85.79 Crore figure represents the portion the agency determined was retained and misappropriated after accounting for whatever services may have been delivered. That determination rests on the reconstruction of fee collections, centre closures, the company’s continuous deficit and the flow of funds to the directors. The public record does not yet supply a line-by-line schedule showing every receipt and every corresponding expenditure. What it does supply is the agency’s conclusion that the retained sum constitutes proceeds of crime under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The same investigation notes that the company remained in continuous deficit while collecting fresh fees. Deficit operations are not automatically criminal. The critical element is the continued solicitation of advance payments for services the management knew could not be provided. When that knowledge is present and the money is nevertheless taken, the transaction ceases to be ordinary commercial risk and enters the domain of misappropriation. The directors’ simultaneous receipt of substantial salaries intensifies the question of priorities. Resources that could have sustained classrooms and faculty instead sustained the personal remuneration of the controlling shareholders amounting to Rs. 24.92 Crore.

Monila Goel’s admission that she signed cheques from home and did not attend office regularly raises further questions about the depth of operational oversight. A director who authorises payments while remaining distant from the daily functioning of centres that are collapsing cannot claim ignorance of the consequences. The continued payment of her salary during the period of closures underscores the disparity between the treatment of the controlling family and the treatment of the teaching staff.

The four underlying first information reports supply the predicate offences. The money-laundering complaint builds on those predicates by tracing the property derived from them. The two proceedings are related yet distinct. One concerns the original acts of breach of trust and cheating. The other concerns the subsequent handling of the resulting funds. Both now stand before the courts. The families who paid the fees stand outside those courtrooms with their own unresolved claims for the education that was never delivered.

The scale of the closures magnifies every individual loss. Thirty-two centres across different cities did not close in isolation. Each closure represented a local network of students, parents, teachers and support staff whose expectations had been shaped by the national brand FIITJEE had built since 1992. That brand had been constructed on the promise of rigorous preparation for the Joint Entrance Examination. The sudden disappearance of the physical centres and the faculty that staffed them converted that promise into a liability measured in lost academic years and unrecovered fees.

The provisional attachment of Rs. 66.92 Crore in properties and the earlier seizure of cash and jewellery are enforcement measures taken during the investigation. They secure assets pending the outcome of the prosecution. They do not yet restore the educational opportunity that evaporated for 14,411 students. Whether any eventual confiscation order will generate funds that reach those students remains an open and pressing question. The legal architecture of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act prioritises the identification and confiscation of proceeds of crime. The architecture of consumer protection and educational continuity for prepaid coaching services remains far less developed.

Parents who paid between Rs. 2.8 Lakh and Rs. 3.5 Lakh per child did so in the expectation that the institution would remain solvent and operational for the duration of the contracted programme. That expectation was reasonable given the public reputation the company had cultivated. The subsequent collapse of thirty-two centres demonstrates how fragile that expectation can become when advance fees are not ring-fenced against the operational risks of the business. The investigation concludes that the management knew the programmes could not be delivered yet continued to enrol students. Knowledge coupled with continued collection is the core of the misappropriation finding that produced the Rs. 85.79 Crore proceeds of crime figure.

The Rs. 24.92 Crore drawn by the two directors from the financial year 2022-23 onwards must be set against the same timeline of mounting operational stress. While the precise monthly breakdown is not fully detailed in the public summary, the aggregate figure and the reported monthly amounts for each director establish a pattern of substantial personal extraction during the period leading into the mass closures. The shareholding concentration of 86.31 percent meant that independent checks on that remuneration were limited. Corporate governance that allows controlling directors to set their own pay while the enterprise fails to meet its core service obligations invites the scrutiny now applied by the Enforcement Directorate.

The human impact extends beyond the immediate financial loss. A student who loses a year of high-quality coaching at the critical stage of JEE preparation may never recover the competitive position that year would have conferred. The psychological cost of disrupted plans, the logistical burden of seeking alternative institutions, and the additional financial strain on families already stretched by the original fees compound the original injury. Teachers who left without full salaries carry both financial and professional damage. The sudden closure of centres also disrupts the local ecosystems of landlords, suppliers and ancillary service providers who depended on the continued operation of those premises.

The investigation records that admissions continued for programmes running until March 2029. That terminal date lies more than two years after the bulk of the closures. Collecting fees for a service that extends that far into the future while centres are already shutting down represents a temporal mismatch of extraordinary proportions. The cash received in 2024 or 2025 was supposed to fund teaching that would still be required in 2028 and 2029. When the capacity to deliver that teaching evaporated, the cash remained in the system or moved to the directors. The proceeds-of-crime quantification of Rs. 85.79 Crore attempts to capture the portion that was retained after the services became impossible.

The earlier searches of April 2025 and the provisional attachment of October 2026 demonstrate the agency’s progressive assembly of the asset picture. Cash of Rs. 10 Lakh and jewellery of Rs. 4.86 Crore were taken into custody at the first stage. Properties valued at Rs. 66.92 Crore were attached later. The combined value of Rs. 71.88 Crore now forms the basis of the confiscation request.

Each of those figures invites evaluation of whether the secured assets will ultimately serve the interests of the students whose fees generated the original funds. The Prevention of Money Laundering Act does not automatically create a restitution fund for victims. Separate legal mechanisms would be required to channel any recovered value back to the affected families.

The continuous deficit of the company during the period of fee collection raises a further interrogative. How does an enterprise operating at a sustained deficit continue to solicit multi-year advance payments without disclosing the financial pressure to the families making those payments. The investigation does not suggest that every coaching company that experiences cash-flow difficulty commits an offence. It does assert that this particular company continued to enrol students after it knew the programmes could not be delivered and that the fees so collected were spent while the deficit persisted. The combination of knowledge, continued collection and subsequent non-delivery is what converts ordinary commercial shortfall into the misappropriation now quantified at Rs. 85.79 Crore.

The directors’ remuneration of Rs. 24.92 Crore during the same period sharpens the critique. Resources that left the company as salary to the controlling family were resources that did not remain available to meet salary obligations to faculty or to sustain the operational continuity of the centres. The disparity between the treatment of the directors and the treatment of the teaching staff is not an incidental detail. It is a central feature of the financial narrative reconstructed by the investigation. When the people who deliver the educational service go unpaid while the people who control the shareholding continue to draw large monthly sums, the prioritisation of interests becomes impossible to ignore.

Fourteen thousand four hundred eleven individual educational trajectories were interrupted. That number is not an abstraction. It represents thousands of households that had budgeted carefully, often sacrificing other expenditures, to secure what they believed was a pathway to elite engineering education. The sudden closure of the centres converted that investment into an unrecoverable cost in both money and time. The subsequent legal process may eventually determine the criminal liability of the company and the directors. It cannot restore the academic calendar that has already passed.

The provisional nature of the Rs. 66.92 Crore attachment must also be kept in view. Attachment secures the assets against dissipation while the case proceeds. It does not yet transfer ownership or generate liquid funds for distribution. The final confiscation order, if granted, will still leave open the question of how any recovered value reaches the students. That secondary process of victim compensation remains outside the immediate scope of the prosecution complaint yet remains the most urgent practical concern for the families involved.

The continued admission of students for programmes extending to March 2029 after the operational capacity had already begun to collapse constitutes one of the most concerning elements of the entire sequence. Each new enrolment under those conditions added to the pool of advance fees while simultaneously increasing the volume of undeliverable obligations. The investigation concludes that the management knew the programmes could not be delivered. The act of continuing to collect fees under that knowledge is what the agency treats as the generative act of the proceeds of crime quantified at Rs. 85.79 Crore.

The Rs. 85.79 Crore figure is therefore not a random total of all fees ever collected. It is the agency’s determination of the portion that was retained after the services became impossible. That determination rests on the comparison of collections against the actual delivery of coaching and the subsequent flow of funds. The absence of a fully public transaction-by-transaction schedule does not diminish the seriousness of the quantified sum. It does, however, leave open the possibility of further refinement once the complete complaint and supporting schedules are examined in court.

The directors’ combined salary of Rs. 24.92 Crore from the financial year 2022-23 onwards covers a multi-year period that overlaps with the deterioration of the company’s ability to meet its teaching obligations. The reported monthly figures of about Rs. 56 Lakh for Dinesh Kumar Goel and more than Rs. 25 Lakh for Monila Goel establish a high personal extraction rate. When those extractions continue while centres close and faculty salaries remain unpaid, the governance failure is not merely procedural. It is substantive and directly linked to the human harm suffered by students and teachers.

The jewellery valued at Rs. 4.86 Crore and the cash of Rs. 10 Lakh seized in April 2025 form tangible components of the overall Rs. 71.88 Crore pool. Their presence among the secured assets raises the question of how personal valuables relate to the corporate fee collections that generated the original proceeds. The investigation treats the entire pool as connected to the money-laundering offence. The precise tracing of each asset to specific fee receipts will be a matter for the court to examine.

The four first information reports that supplied the predicate offences remain the foundation of the money-laundering case. Those reports documented the complaints of students and others who had paid for services that were not delivered. The subsequent police charge sheet in Noida, drawing on statements from approximately three hundred victims and other witnesses, further fleshed out the factual matrix. The Enforcement Directorate’s complaint builds on that matrix by quantifying the retained fees at Rs. 85.79 Crore and tracing the property derived from them.

The abrupt character of the thirty-two centre closures intensifies the disruption. Centres that close with notice may allow students to make alternative arrangements. Centres that close without notice leave students stranded mid-programme with no immediate pathway to continue their preparation. The investigation records that the closures occurred after faculty left over unpaid salaries. The causal chain therefore runs from unpaid salaries to faculty departure to centre closure to student abandonment. At each link in that chain the controlling directors continued to receive their own substantial remuneration amounting to Rs. 24.92 Crore in total.

The temporal span of the programmes for which fees were collected, extending in some cases to March 2029, creates a particularly long liability tail. Money taken in the present was supposed to fund teaching years into the future. When the institutional capacity to provide that teaching collapsed, the future obligations remained while the corresponding funds had already been spent or extracted. The proceeds-of-crime quantification attempts to isolate the portion of those funds that corresponds to the undelivered services and arrives at Rs. 85.79 Crore.

The concentration of 86.31 percent shareholding in the Goel family meant that the ordinary checks and balances of dispersed ownership were absent. Directors who also control the overwhelming majority of shares face reduced external pressure to moderate their own remuneration or to prioritise operational continuity over personal extraction. The investigation highlights that concentration as enabling the approval of the directors’ salaries without independent scrutiny. The result was a governance structure in which the interests of the controlling family and the interests of the students and teachers diverged sharply.

The 14,411 affected students represent only the enrolled cohort at the closed centres. The broader reputational and systemic impact on the coaching industry is more difficult to quantify yet equally concerning. Families evaluating other multi-year advance-fee programmes now confront the demonstrated possibility that an established national brand can collect substantial fees and then fail to deliver the promised instruction. The policy question of whether stronger safeguards, clearer disclosures or financial protections should surround such advance-fee arrangements arises directly from the facts of this case.

The Enforcement Directorate’s complaint seeks both conviction and confiscation. Conviction would establish criminal liability. Confiscation would transfer the identified assets valued at Rs. 71.88 Crore to the Central Government. Neither outcome automatically restores the educational opportunity lost by the students or the salaries lost by the teachers. The gap between the criminal process and the remedial needs of the victims remains a structural feature of the present legal framework. Bridging that gap will require either creative use of existing restitution mechanisms or new legislative attention to the vulnerabilities of the advance-fee education model.

The continued payment of director salaries during the period of centre closures stands as one of the most striking features of the financial narrative. While classrooms emptied and faculty departed, the monthly flows to Dinesh Kumar Goel and Monila Goel persisted. The investigation records that payments to Monila Goel continued even as the centres were shutting. That continuity of personal remuneration against the discontinuity of the educational service crystallises the prioritisation that the agency now challenges as part of the money-laundering offence.

The Rs. 85.79 Crore proceeds-of-crime figure and the Rs. 71.88 Crore asset pool together define the financial scale of the case. The first figure measures the retained student fees. The second measures the value of property the agency has secured and now seeks to confiscate. The relationship between the two figures is not one of simple equivalence. The proceeds quantification is an investigative conclusion about the origin of the funds. The asset valuation is an enforcement measure aimed at preserving value for eventual confiscation. Whether the preserved value will ever reach the students whose fees created the original pool remains the unanswered practical question.

The human cost measured in interrupted academic careers cannot be reduced to either of those rupee figures. Each of the 14,411 students carried an individual set of aspirations, family investments and time-sensitive preparation needs. The sudden withdrawal of the coaching they had purchased imposed costs that no subsequent court order can fully reverse. The time lost in the academic calendar is irreversible. The competitive disadvantage relative to peers who continued uninterrupted preparation is real. The additional financial burden of seeking alternative coaching, where available, compounds the original loss.

The investigation’s finding that the company knew it could not deliver the programmes yet continued to admit students converts what might otherwise have been treated as a commercial failure into a sequence of intentional acts generating proceeds of crime. Knowledge of incapacity coupled with continued solicitation of advance fees is the decisive element. Without that knowledge the non-delivery of services might remain a civil matter of breach of contract. With that knowledge the same non-delivery becomes the foundation of the criminal and money-laundering case now before the Special Court in Ghaziabad.

The directors’ control of the company and their simultaneous extraction of Rs. 24.92 Crore in salary place them at the centre of both the operational decisions and the financial flows. The investigation treats them as the persons who controlled the enterprise and who received the substantial personal benefits while the enterprise failed to meet its obligations to students and staff. Their shareholding concentration reinforced that control. The combination of ownership, decision-making authority and personal financial extraction is what the prosecution complaint now asks the court to examine under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.

The provisional attachment of properties worth Rs. 66.92 Crore on 09.10.2026 and the earlier seizures of cash of Rs. 10 Lakh and jewellery worth Rs. 4.86 Crore together form the tangible pool against which the confiscation request is made. The process of attachment itself is an intermediate enforcement step. It does not finally determine ownership or liability. It does, however, freeze the identified assets so that they remain available if the court ultimately orders confiscation. The families who paid the original fees will watch that process with the understanding that even a successful confiscation does not guarantee their own financial recovery.

The scale of the disruption across thirty-two centres and 14,411 students elevates the case beyond any single local dispute. It raises systemic questions about the reliability of multi-year advance-fee commitments in the coaching sector. When an institution of national standing can collect fees for programmes extending years into the future and then close centres en masse, the ordinary assumptions of consumer protection and educational continuity are placed under severe strain. The Enforcement Directorate’s quantification of Rs. 85.79 Crore as proceeds of crime is one response to that strain. The larger response required from policy makers and the industry itself remains to be formulated.

The contrast between the directors’ continued remuneration and the unpaid salaries of the faculty is not merely a matter of numbers. It is a matter of whose interests the corporate structure protected when financial pressure mounted. The investigation records that faculty left because salaries were not paid. The same investigation records that the directors continued to receive large monthly sums. The divergence of those two outcomes under a single corporate roof is the governance failure that the money-laundering complaint now seeks to address through criminal process.

The temporal mismatch between fee collection and service delivery remains the structural vulnerability that the case exposes. Cash received today for teaching that must continue for years creates an inherent tension. When that tension is managed responsibly the model can function. When it is managed by continuing to collect fees after the capacity to teach has already collapsed, the model generates the very proceeds of crime that the Enforcement Directorate has now quantified at Rs. 85.79 Crore.

The students and families who stand on the receiving end of that collapse are left with the irreversible loss of preparation time and the still-open question of whether any recovered assets valued at Rs. 71.88 Crore will ever compensate them for the education they purchased but never received.