Seven Summonses, Two Appearances, Zero Possession: Nayan Raheja Drafts a Blueprint for Absence While 4,600 Homebuyers Wait for a Foundation of Justice

The attendance register: present twice, absent five times

In the Raheja universe, “possession” has always been a flexible concept. Homebuyers have waited more than a decade for it. The Enforcement Directorate, it turns out, has had almost as much trouble getting possession of Nayan N. Raheja for a few hours of questioning.

On 19 September 2026, Special Judge (PMLA) Sachin Jain of the Saket District Court dismissed his anticipatory bail plea. The order, as reported by ANI, does the arithmetic that no public-relations statement can undo. Summonses were served on seven occasions. He appeared at the ED’s Gurugram Zonal Office on two. He failed to appear and cooperate on five, in the court’s words, “on one pretext or the other.”

That is an attendance rate of 28.6 per cent. A college student with that record does not get to sit the exam. A homebuyer with that payment record gets a cancellation letter and a forfeited deposit.

It gets worse, because there was a promise. On 30 July 2026 the Delhi High Court took on record his undertaking that “the petitioner will fully cooperate with the Enforcement Directorate.” Special Public Prosecutor Anand Kirti placed that undertaking before the Saket court. The court’s conclusion was blunt: his conduct of “not appearing and cooperating in the investigation as and when summoned disentitles him to the concession of anticipatory bail.”

A builder-buyer agreement, a High Court undertaking, a summons under Section 50 of the PMLA: in this story, every document with a date on it seems to be treated as a rough sketch, open to revision.

The court also held that the twin conditions of Section 45(1)(ii) of the PMLA were not satisfied, and that he had not shown reasonable grounds for believing he is not guilty of money laundering. Having lost in Saket, he has gone upstairs. On 1 October, Justice Amit Bansal of the Delhi High Court heard opening arguments. The ED’s counsel, Rajat Nair, called him non-cooperative and sought time; the matter was listed for 6 October.

His senior counsel, Vikas Pahwa, told the High Court the applicant “is ready to join investigation.” Ready, that is, after seven summonses, one undertaking and one rejection. The readiness has arrived roughly on the same schedule as the flats.

“I only draw the drawings”: a defence with thin walls

The defence is an exercise in minimalist design. Nayan Raheja, the court was told, was never involved in the day-to-day management or decision-making of Raheja Developers Ltd (RDL). He was a director only from 15 January 2003 to 12 January 2008, and again from 16 August 2010 to 26 November 2010. He holds 0.81 per cent of the shares. He draws a salary for “advising towards architectural drawings.” He has not been charge-sheeted in the predicate offences, so, the argument runs, no proceeds of crime can be laid at his door.

In short: the surname on the building is his, the father who runs it is his, but the building itself is none of his business.

The ED has declined to admire the elevation. Its case, as recorded by the court, is that there is “sufficient material” that he was looking after the affairs of RDL, the parent company named in every FIR in the case, “or at least” was a director of RDL subsidiaries into which homebuyers’ funds were diverted for non-construction purposes. That is an allegation, not a finding of guilt. But the Saket court refused to accept the defence’s escape hatch. Not being named in the FIRs, or being named but not charge-sheeted, does not “ipso facto” absolve a person under the PMLA. He must at least prima facie show he did not deal with proceeds of crime. He did not.

There is also a curious matter of job titles. In the anticipatory bail hearings, he is a “former director” who left the boardroom in 2010. Yet when the ED sought open-ended non-bailable warrants against father and son in August, the PTI report of the order described him as the company’s Managing Director. And in the High Court on 1 October, his own counsel reportedly pitched the family credentials: a “well known builder” with around 15 completed projects and about 2,000 flats for the BPL category.

So which is it? A builder when the court needs to be impressed, a draughtsman when the court needs to be persuaded? A defence cannot be a duplex, with one floor for reputation and another for deniability.

One more detail belongs on the record. On 3 August 2026, Additional Sessions Judge Sheetal Chaudhary Pradhan declined, for the time being, to issue the warrants the ED wanted, and granted both Navin and Nayan Raheja interim protection from arrest, directing them to join the investigation whenever called. The defence said both had appeared four times in 2025. The ED said they then failed to appear on four occasions and ignored summonses issued in April 2026. Six weeks after that direction to cooperate, a different judge counted five absences out of seven.

Follow the money, if you can find it

Strip away the bail arguments and one number remains. According to the ED, Raheja Developers collected about ₹2,425.99 crore from nearly 4,600 homebuyers on the promise of homes. The FIRs, registered in Delhi and Gurugram, including by the Delhi Police Economic Offences Wing, allege the money was not used to finish the projects it was collected for. The projects named before the court read like a brochure for a city that was never built: Raheja Revanta, Shilas, Trinity, Oma, Raheja Mall, Aranya, Atharva and Vedanta.

The ED searched premises linked to the company and its promoters in June 2025, and again at about seven Delhi-NCR locations on 25 April 2026. Then came the attachments, three in barely three months.

Sources: Moneylife, The420.in, citing ED statements. Values are the ED’s estimated market values; the attachments are provisional and open to challenge.

Set the two totals side by side: ₹2,425.99 crore taken in, ₹2,399.65 crore frozen. The agency has now attached assets worth almost exactly what the buyers paid. That raises the question that should keep this family awake: if assets of that value existed all along, why do the homes not?

The buyers got brochures. The agency found real estate. Somewhere between the two lies the plot, in both senses of the word.

The back catalogue: sixteen years of red flags

None of this arrived without warning. Raheja Developers, founded by Navin Raheja in 1990, has spent the better part of two decades collecting notices almost as steadily as it collected instalments. The record below is drawn from court reporting, regulator action and the company’s own published history.

Sources: ANI via Asianet, PTI via The Pioneer, LiveLaw, The Tribune, The Statesman, Wikipedia and the reports it cites.

Read the table from the bottom. A tax raid in 2010. A black-money sting and a PMO reference in 2014. Insolvency in 2019, 2024 and 2026. A regulator’s sales ban in 2023. Revanta, launched in 2011 and sold as a skyline-defining address, even won a “Luxury Project of the Year” award in 2020, while its buyers were still paying rent elsewhere. The only thing this company has delivered ahead of schedule is litigation.

A separate dispute with Arabtec, the Dubai contractor engaged to build Revanta, over termination of the construction contract also reached the Delhi High Court in 2020.

The company’s version: blame the roads

Fairness requires the other side, and the other side has been consistent. After the April 2026 searches, Raheja Developers said that “no fraud has been committed in the Revanta project,” that it “has invested significantly more than customer collections, as confirmed by a RERA-supervised forensic audit,” and that “no funds have been diverted.” It blames the delay on the government’s failure to provide essential infrastructure despite the company paying development charges in full. Before the NCLT it claimed to be solvent and viable, and warned that insolvency would hurt around 40,000 homebuyers across 35 projects.

These claims deserve testing, not dismissal. So test them. If the audit clears the company, publish it in full. If more was spent than collected, show the buyers the ledger. If the state failed to build the roads, that explains a delay; it does not explain why money allegedly moved to subsidiaries for non-construction purposes, which is the ED’s actual charge.

And if there is nothing to hide, the easiest way to prove it is also the cheapest: turn up when summoned. Innocence does not usually need five adjournments.

Four years, no charge sheet in sight: the system’s own missed summons

It would be too easy to aim every barb at one family. The slower scandal is institutional.

The ED’s case was registered in 2022. The first searches came in June 2025, three years later. The first attachment came in April 2026, four years later. The agency asked for non-bailable warrants only in August 2026, a delay the defence itself threw back at it in court. An agency that takes four years to knock on the door cannot be surprised when the occupant has learned to stay out.

The regulators fared no better. Haryana RERA banned Revanta sales in 2023, twelve years after launch, by which time buyers had already paid over 95 per cent. The insolvency tribunals have now opened project-by-project proceedings for Shilas and Revanta, after the first attempt in 2019 was unwound within months. Each forum has its own file, its own dates, its own adjournments. The homebuyer, who has one life and one EMI, is expected to follow all of them.

And so the pattern India knows by heart repeats itself. Bail hearings move in weeks. Trials move in decades. A buyer who booked in 2011 has by now watched a child go from primary school to college while waiting for a flat, and is asked to be patient while lawyers debate whether 0.81 per cent is enough shareholding to answer a question.

As of this writing, no court has convicted anyone in this case. That is precisely the complaint. Fifteen years after the first bookings, the law has produced attachments, undertakings and anticipatory bail orders, but not one verdict and not one set of keys.

What must happen now

Sarcasm builds no homes. These seven steps would.

1. The ED must finish what it started. File the prosecution complaint. A 2022 case that has yielded ₹2,399.65 crore in attachments has enough material to go to trial, or it does not. Either way, say so within months, not years.
2. Summonses must mean something. Five non-appearances after a High Court undertaking should carry a consequence. If the undertaking was breached, the agency should place that squarely before the High Court that recorded it.
3. The High Court should decide the bail plea on a fixed, short timetable. Whichever way it rules, the buyers and the accused are both entitled to a prompt, reasoned order, not a calendar of dates.
4. The PMLA trial should run day to day. Special courts exist for this. A trial that outlives its complainants is not justice delayed; it is justice demolished.
5. Attached assets must reach the buyers. Properties worth ₹2,399.65 crore sitting frozen help nobody. The ED and the special court should move early on restitution to verified homebuyers under the PMLA, coordinated with the insolvency professionals.
6. Publish the forensic audit. The company cites it. Haryana RERA ordered it. The buyers paid for the project it examines. There is no reason it should remain a rumour.
7. One coordinated track. ED, EOW, Haryana RERA and the resolution professionals for Shilas and Revanta are working the same facts in separate rooms. A joint mechanism, with a public status report every quarter, would end the forum-hopping that delay thrives on.

Nayan Raheja says his job is advising on architectural drawings. He will know that a structure is judged by whether it stands up, not by the confidence of the presentation. The same test applies to his defence, and to the justice system examining it. He promised the High Court full cooperation and delivered two visits out of seven. His family’s company promised thousands of families a home and, the ED alleges, delivered a money trail instead.

The buyers have kept their side of every agreement. It is long past time that everyone else in this story showed up.

Where the case stands

The matters described here are allegations under investigation and findings made at the anticipatory bail stage. Refusal of anticipatory bail is not a conviction. No court has convicted Nayan N. Raheja, Navin M. Raheja or Raheja Developers Ltd of money laundering or of the underlying offences, and all are presumed innocent. The ED’s attachments are provisional. The company denies any fraud or diversion of funds. The outcome of the Delhi High Court hearing listed for 6 October 2026 had not been reported in the sources reviewed for this article.