Is Kabul Chawla Going To Sue the RBI and the ED for Defaming Him and Extorting Rs 4.84 Crore?
He has already tried the theory on a journalist. The regulator and the agency have now put out the same numbers, with letterheads. If a published record of his own FEMA file is extortion, the compounding order is a demand note, and the two directors should sue the institutions that wrote it. They will not. The theory only travels in one direction.
Inventiva, the site run under Nine Network and associated with Nitin Naresh, spent 2025 and 2026 writing about BPTP Limited, Kabul Chawla and Sudhanshu Tripathi from documents that were not invented in a newsroom. The Enforcement Directorate’s press release of 29 August 2025 is a public document. It says the Gurugram office searched BPTP’s offices and the residences of chairman and managing director Kabul Chawla and whole-time director Sudhanshu Tripathi on 26 and 27 August 2025. It says the company received Rs 322.5 crore from CPI India I Ltd, Port Louis, and Rs 215 crore from Harbour Victoria Investment Holding Ltd, under the automatic route in 2007–08, structured with put and swap options that promised guaranteed returns on exit. It says the seized material showed that the RBI had directed the company to amend the shareholders’ agreement and delete the put, and that BPTP did not. It says Chawla was the beneficial owner of foreign entities, one of them used to buy a costly property in New York, and that the property and the source of funds were under examination. It says multiple FIRs were already registered in Delhi-NCR for projects not completed and for diversion of funds. A reporter who quotes that release is not leaking a rumour. He is reading the agency aloud.
The CBI file is not a blogger’s exhibit either. On 20 April 2026, in Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 150 of 2026, BPTP Limited and a director were the petitioners against the CBI. The Supreme Court recorded that FIR RC2192026E0001 had been registered at the Economic Offences-I police station, New Delhi, against the petitioners, in purported compliance with this Court’s own directions of 23 September 2025 in SLP (Civil) No. 7649 of 2023. The project named is Pedestal @70A, Sector 70-A, Gurugram. The batch is about alleged builder-bank collusion on subvention schemes. BPTP’s answer in that order was that 180 units were complete and that the complaining buyers were few. The FIR was not quashed on the face of that order. Citing it is not a stunt. It is a citation.
The compounding release of 1 October 2026 is the punchline the company would rather frame as a settlement press note. The RBI, on 17 September 2026, under Section 15 of FEMA, compounded one contravention: issuance of shares to foreign investors with an optionality clause assuring an assured return and an exit price, contrary to Regulation 5(1) read with paragraph 2 of Schedule 1 to FEMA 20/2000-RB. The sum involved is Rs 5,37,50,00,000. The company is to pay Rs 4,03,62,500. Kabul Chawla is to pay Rs 40,36,250. Sudhanshu Tripathi is to pay Rs 40,36,250. Total, Rs 4,84,35,000. Closure, the release says, is “only with respect to the contravention compounded.” The arithmetic is the RBI’s own grid for a non-reporting breach that has run five years or more: 0.75 percent of Rs 537.50 crore plus Rs 50,000 is Rs 4,03,62,500, to the rupee. Each director’s line is a tenth of that. A journalist who prints those figures is not demanding money. The RBI already did, and the applicants filed the applications.
That is the record Inventiva was working from: an ED search note, a Supreme Court order reciting a CBI FIR, and then an ED compounding note with a price. Around it sit the older public threads a reporter can pull without a single anonymous source. Chawla has been managing director since 11 August 2003, the month of incorporation, CIN U45201HR2003PLC082732. Tripathi has been whole-time director since 30 January 2006, the year before the Mauritius money, and the company’s own page still gives him land, licensing and business development. Registry-linked compilations put FY2026 revenue near Rs 1,015.64 crore. The ED’s August note, not a campaign pamphlet, is what put the Delhi-NCR FIRs for non-completion and diversion into the official sentence. Adverse RERA and consumer orders in individual buyer disputes are a matter of those forums’ records. They are not, by themselves, a criminal conviction. They are also not a secret.
BPTP’s answer to the writing was a civil suit, CS(OS) 297/2026, BPTP Limited v. Nitin Naresh and others, in the Delhi High Court. Senior counsel came with it. On 7 April 2026 Justice Mini Pushkarna did not give the ad-interim injunction the company wanted against the articles. The court recorded a fair-comment direction for future pieces and left the publications standing. High-profile representation, no takedown. That is the order on the record, and it is an awkward one for a promoter who has spent the year describing coverage of official documents as a shakedown.
Then came the recording. On 22 September 2026, five days after the RBI compounding orders, BPTP was back before Justice Tushar Rao Gedela on an application under Order XXXIX Rule 2A, alleging breach of an order dated 3 September 2026. Senior advocate Rajiv Nayar told the court that Naresh had called Jai Shankar, described as the company’s authorised representative, in what “appeared to be” a call of extortion for money. Counsel played about twelve minutes on an iPad and asked for immediate action. Naresh, in person, said no such call ever took place, that the clip was in all probability an AI clone of his voice, that the application had no Section 65B certificate, and that the file should go to a forensic laboratory. The judge did not pick a winner. He said the allegations may have serious repercussions, and that before any conclusion the recording’s truth had to be tested. He sent it to the CFSL at CBI Headquarters, Lodhi Road, with the original device, for veracity and hash value, report in four weeks, in a sealed cover. The contempt order BPTP’s counsel asked for was not made.
What was made was a silence direction, and the order states its source. Naresh “voluntarily” said a gag could be passed. Till 2 November 2026 he is to keep quiet on the subject matter of the suit. A volunteered pause is not a finding that the call happened. It is also not a finding that the articles were false. The forensic report is not in. Anyone who writes that a court has held the voice note to be an AI fake is ahead of the laboratory. Anyone who writes that a court has held Naresh guilty of extortion is ahead of the same laboratory, in the other direction. The verified fact is narrower and, for BPTP, worse: the company asked a judge to treat an uncertified iPad playback as contemptuous extortion, and the judge refused to treat it as proved.
Which brings us to the joke the company has written for itself.
If printing the ED’s search release is defamation, the ED defamed them. If printing the RBI’s compounding figure is a demand for money, the RBI extorted them, and they paid. If a reporter who files those documents in a defamation suit is running a coordinated shakedown, then the Directorate and the central bank are the senior partners, and Kabul Chawla should sue both for Rs 4.84 crore, with interest, for the distress of being asked to pay a sum he applied to pay. Sudhanshu Tripathi can join. His personal line is Rs 40.36 lakh, which is either a compounding amount under Section 15 or, on the theory BPTP offered the High Court, a remarkably well-documented demand.
He will not file that suit. The RBI does not negotiate a deletion over the telephone. The ED’s no-objection is not a goodwill gesture extracted after a twelve-minute call. The October release even explains, in its boilerplate, that a no-objection is issued where the contravention is eligible, the conditions are met, and no legal bar such as suspected money-laundering stands in the way. The company asked for that door. It walked through it. Calling the bill a shakedown would require Chawla to tell a court that his own compounding application was a payment under duress to the Reserve Bank of India. Designated seniors have argued thinner briefs. They have not yet argued that one.
The strategic tell is the choice of target. Official paper is awkward to sue. A journalist who will not stop quoting it is not. So the suit is CS(OS) 297/2026, not a writ against the RBI, and the exhibit is a recording the defendant says is a clone and the court has not accepted. The FEMA file, the CBI FIR recited by the Supreme Court, and the Rs 4,84,35,000 order remain where they were. Silence until 2 November, offered by the defendant and limited to the subject matter of the suit, does not unprint the Directorate.
The sarcastic question in the headline answers itself. Kabul Chawla is not going to sue the RBI and the ED for defaming him and extorting Rs 4.84 crore. He is going to keep paying institutions that publish, and keep suing the man who noticed. The first bill has a section of FEMA under it. The second, so far, has an iPad, a denial, and a laboratory that has not reported.
