Compounded, Not Cleared: Rs 537.5 Crore of Mauritius Money, a $19.4-Million Manhattan Apartment and the BPTP Questions India’s Agencies Have Yet to Answer
BPTP Limited and two of its directors have been allowed to settle a Rs 537.5-crore foreign-exchange contravention for about Rs 4.84 crore. That payment ends one civil proceeding. It does not tell the public who paid for an apartment on the 68th floor of a New York tower, and thirteen months after the Enforcement Directorate raised that question, no agency has answered it.
A Rs 537.5-crore breach, closed for less than one per cent
On 17 September 2026 the Reserve Bank of India issued compounding orders against BPTP Limited, its chairman and managing director Kabul Chawla, and whole-time director Sudhanshu Tripathi. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) announced the orders on 1 October 2026, according to ANI.
The company was directed to pay Rs 4.03 crore. Mr Chawla and Mr Tripathi were directed to pay about Rs 40.36 lakh each. The total is about Rs 4.84 crore.
The foreign investment at the centre of the case was Rs 537.5 crore. The price of closing the file is roughly 0.9 per cent of that sum.
The ED described two contraventions of the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 (FEMA). The first: BPTP’s agreements with its foreign investors carried put options and assured returns, which the rules of the time did not permit. The second: BPTP initially parked around Rs 320 crore of the foreign money in fixed deposits and mutual funds instead of putting it into its projects.
The sequence matters. The ED filed its complaint before the Adjudicating Authority in December 2025. BPTP then went to the RBI and asked to compound. The ED raised no objection. Nine months after the complaint, the matter was priced and closed.
Compounding is lawful. It is a civil settlement that FEMA itself provides for. It is neither a conviction nor an acquittal. But nobody should mistake it for a clean chit, and the timeline is its own indictment of the system: the money came in during August 2007 and July 2008, and the search came in August 2025.
The ED said payment would end the adjudication proceedings relating to these FEMA contraventions. The ANI report of the agency’s statement says nothing about the New York property, the foreign entities or the police FIRs that the same agency flagged a year earlier. Those questions were not compounded. They were simply left hanging.
What the Enforcement Directorate put on record in August 2025
The ED’s Gurugram office searched multiple locations in Delhi-NCR and Noida on 26 and 27 August 2025. The targets were BPTP’s offices and the residences of Mr Chawla and Mr Tripathi. The agency set out its case in a press release dated 29 August 2025.
That release makes five assertions.
- BPTP received foreign direct investment of more than Rs 500 crore from Mauritius-based entities in violation of FEMA rules.
- The money came in two parts: Rs 322.5 crore from CPI India I Ltd of Port Louis, and Rs 215 crore from Harbour Victoria Investment Holding Ltd. Together, Rs 537.5 crore.
- The investments came through the automatic route but carried clauses that gave the foreign investors guaranteed returns on exit. The ED said the RBI had specifically directed the company to remove the prohibited put-option clause, and that the company did not comply.
- Kabul Chawla was found to be the beneficial owner of multiple foreign entities. One of them had earlier been used to buy what the agency called a costly immovable property in New York. The entities, the property and the source of the funds used to buy it were placed under examination.
- Multiple FIRs stood registered against BPTP and its directors at police stations across Delhi-NCR, for non-completion of projects over long periods and for diversion of funds. Those too were under examination.
The agency said it froze bank lockers and seized documents and digital evidence.
Every one of these is an assertion by an investigating agency. None is a finding by a court. But they are not the claims of an aggrieved buyer or a rival. They are the written, published position of the Government of India’s foreign-exchange enforcement arm, and the fourth and fifth remain unresolved in public.
The courts had this money in front of them a decade earlier
The ED did not discover the Mauritius investment in 2025. It had been in open court for years.
On 3 July 2015 Justice S. Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court decided BPTP Limited v. CPI India I Limited, an appeal arising from arbitration between the company and its investor. The judgment records that CPI India I Ltd, a Mauritius company, put Rs 322.5 crore into BPTP for about 5.67 per cent of its equity under agreements dated 10 August 2007. Mr Chawla and Anjali Chawla are identified as promoters.
Those agreements gave the investor a ladder of exits if BPTP failed to list: a swap option, sale rights and a put option. BPTP’s own draft prospectus of 2010 told prospective shareholders that CPI had exercised its sale right on 6 August 2009 and picked eight of the company’s forthcoming projects for sale.
The exit clauses that the ED called unlawful in 2025 were, in other words, printed in a court judgment in 2015 and referred to in a public offer document in 2010. By the ED’s own account the RBI told the company to delete the put option, and the company did not. No enforcement action became public until August 2025.
The 2015 judgment matters for a second reason. Two of the projects tied to the investor’s exit were housing projects with ordinary buyers in them: Park Serene and Park Arena. The court record shows BPTP had collected about Rs 213 crore from flat purchasers in those two projects. CPI wanted that money in escrow. BPTP said it had already been spent on construction, pleaded a financial crunch, and sought room to borrow Rs 125 crore from IFCI.
The court did not find fraud, and this report does not suggest it did. What the record shows is narrower and still serious: by 2015 a foreign investor and BPTP were fighting in court over who controlled hundreds of crores paid in by homebuyers, and a judge had to order the company to account for it.
The 68th floor
On 9 February 2015 The New York Times published an investigation by Stephanie Saul and Louise Story as part of its Towers of Secrecy series. Its subject was Apartment 68AF in the south tower of the Time Warner Center in Manhattan.
The facts the newspaper reported were these. The apartment measures 4,050 square feet, with five bedrooms and views over Central Park. It was bought outright in February 2012 for $19.4 million, among the 25 costliest residential sales in New York that year. The owner of record was NYC Real Estate Opportunities, a Delaware company with a Singapore address. The contract allowed the buyer to pass ownership to a company held through the Cayman Islands or the British Virgin Islands, or to a trust.
The named purchaser was Aneil Anand. But in a lawsuit over brokerage fees, an email surfaced in which a broker for the seller wrote that the buyer’s broker was “in direct communication with Kabul”. Asked why the deed carried Mr Anand’s name and not Mr Chawla’s, the president of the seller’s brokerage told the paper: “I think they usually just put it in another name for public records.”
Mr Chawla denied it. He told the newspaper his family used the apartment but that it belonged to Mr Anand, whom he called a cousin. “I don’t own an apartment in New York,” he said. His office later told Outlook that neither he nor his wife owned that property or any other in New York.
The newspaper set the apartment against what was happening in Haryana. Nearly 200 military officers had put down deposits at BPTP’s Park Serene in 2008. By late 2014, protesters said, the company had collected almost the full price from 400 buyers, more than $35 million by their estimate, and had not handed over the flats. A retired major general spoke for them. In 2012, the year the apartment was bought, BPTP had claimed 22,000 customers and sales of $1.6 billion.
BPTP denied wrongdoing. It blamed delays on outside factors, including the government’s failure to build infrastructure, and said other developers faced the same problems.
One more fact belongs here, and it favours Mr Chawla. In July 2015 a US federal judge rejected JPMorgan Chase’s attempt to stop any transfer of the apartment. The bank wanted it towards a $90-million award against Mr Chawla. The judge held there was insufficient evidence to link the apartment to him, The Real Deal reported, citing the Times.
So matters stood for ten years: a denial, a suggestive email, and a court that found the link unproven. Then, in August 2025, the ED wrote that Mr Chawla was the beneficial owner of a foreign entity used to buy a costly New York property. The agency’s release does not name the building or the entity. It has not said publicly what evidence it holds. If it has what a US court lacked, the public has a right to know. If it does not, Mr Chawla has a right to have the insinuation withdrawn.
The link nobody has shown
It would be easy, and wrong, to draw a straight line from Port Louis to Columbus Circle.
No public document shows that any part of the Rs 537.5 crore paid for the apartment. The foreign money reached BPTP in 2007 and 2008. The apartment was bought in 2012. By the ED’s own account, about Rs 320 crore of the investment sat for a time in fixed deposits and mutual funds. No court or agency has found that homebuyers’ money left India. No authority has made a finding of money laundering or hawala against Mr Chawla or BPTP, and the ED’s case was brought under FEMA, a civil statute.
What exists is a set of facts that sit uncomfortably close together, and one sentence from a federal agency that it has declined to finish.
The ED said the source of funds was under examination. An examination has an end. Either the $19.4 million is traced to lawful, declared, tax-paid income, or it is not. Thirteen months on, the agency has compounded the technical breach and announced no outcome on the substantive one.
That silence damages everyone. It leaves thousands of BPTP customers guessing. It leaves a businessman under a cloud that no court has put there. And it tells every promoter in the country that the easy file gets closed while the hard one gathers dust.
A second front: the CBI and the Supreme Court
The FEMA case is not the only one. Since April 2025 the Supreme Court has been monitoring a Central Bureau of Investigation probe into what the court has called an unholy nexus between builders and banks under subvention schemes, in which banks paid loan money straight to developers while buyers waited for homes.
On 14 April 2026 the CBI registered 22 new cases on the court’s directions and searched 77 locations across eight states, PTI reported. That took the total to 50 FIRs. On 6 August 2026 the court ordered seven states to lend police officers to the CBI within ten days, and told lenders including HDFC to decide quickly on sanction to prosecute their own officials, LiveLaw reported.
BPTP is in that batch. According to published accounts of a Supreme Court order dated 20 April 2026 in Writ Petition (Criminal) No. 150 of 2026, the CBI registered FIR RC2192026E0001 against the company over its Pedestal @70A project in Sector 70-A, Gurugram. BPTP went to the court against the CBI. Its counsel said 180 units in the project had been completed and that only two homebuyers had complained. The court disposed of the petition and left the company free to put its material before the investigators.
An FIR is the start of an investigation, not proof of anything. BPTP’s defence is on the record and deserves to be weighed. But a company now faces a CBI case registered under Supreme Court supervision, a set of police FIRs that the ED itself counted, and an unanswered foreign-asset question, all at once. That is not a routine compliance history.
Where the record stands
| Status | What it covers | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Established | BPTP received Rs 322.5 crore (August 2007) and Rs 215 crore (July 2008) from two Mauritius entities | ED statements, 2025 and 2026; Delhi High Court, 2015 |
| Established | The FEMA contravention on those investments was compounded on 17 September 2026 for about Rs 4.84 crore | ED statement of 1 October 2026 |
| Established | A $19.4-million Manhattan apartment was bought in February 2012 through a Delaware company; Mr Chawla’s family used it; he denies owning it | The New York Times, 2015 |
| Established | A US federal judge found insufficient evidence to tie the apartment to Mr Chawla | Reported July 2015 |
| Alleged, under examination | Mr Chawla is beneficial owner of foreign entities, one used to buy a New York property | ED press release, 29 August 2025 |
| Alleged, under investigation | Non-completion of projects and diversion of funds | Police FIRs cited by the ED |
| Alleged, under investigation | Irregularities in a subvention scheme at Pedestal @70A | CBI FIR, April 2026 |
| Not shown | That Mauritius money or homebuyers’ money paid for the apartment | No public evidence |
| Not shown | Money laundering, hawala or any criminal offence by Mr Chawla | No finding by any court |
What must happen now
India’s enforcement record in builder cases is a record of delay. Money arrived in 2007. An email naming “Kabul” lay in a New York court file. A foreign newspaper did the tracing in 2015. An Indian agency searched in 2025. The only concluded outcome, in 2026, is a settlement at under one per cent. Homebuyers have waited through every one of those years.
That is not good enough, and the remedy is not complicated.
- The ED must close the loop on the New York property. It raised the question in a press release. It owes the public a dated answer: a show-cause notice, a complaint, or a written statement that the funds were found lawful.
- Trace the money through formal channels. Bank and ownership records sit in the United States, Singapore and Mauritius. India has legal-assistance arrangements for exactly this. The agency should say whether it has used them.
- The police FIRs need an end date. The ED counted multiple FIRs alleging diversion of funds. Each should end in a charge sheet or a closure report, filed in court, within a fixed period.
- The CBI must finish, not drift. The Supreme Court has already had to order states to supply officers. The Pedestal @70A case should reach a charge sheet or closure on a timetable the court sets, and banks must stop sitting on sanction requests.
- The RBI should explain its arithmetic. A Rs 537.5-crore contravention settled for Rs 4.84 crore may be exactly what the rules prescribe. The reasoning should be public so that nobody has to guess.
- Try these cases quickly. Where charges are filed, trials should run day to day. A case that takes fifteen years punishes the innocent accused and rewards the guilty one.
- BPTP and Mr Chawla should answer in the open. Who owns NYC Real Estate Opportunities? Who paid the $19.4 million, and from which account? A clear answer with documents would end this story faster than any lawsuit.
Speed cuts both ways. A fast, tight investigation is the only thing that can convict a wrongdoer. It is also the only thing that can clear a man who has done nothing wrong.
Disclaimer
This report is based on press releases of the Enforcement Directorate, court records and published news reports, cited below. Allegations remain allegations until a competent court decides them. An FIR, a search, a press release by an investigating agency and a compounding order are not findings of guilt. Compounding under FEMA is a civil settlement and carries no finding of criminal liability.
On the public record reviewed for this report, no court of law has convicted Mr Kabul Chawla, Mr Sudhanshu Tripathi or BPTP Limited of any criminal offence in connection with the matters described here, as of 9 October 2026. A police case against Mr Chawla from 2011 was closed in 2013 without charges, according to The New York Times. A US federal court in 2015 declined to hold that the Manhattan apartment belonged to him.
Every person named is presumed innocent. Nothing in this report asserts that the Mauritius investments or homebuyers’ funds were used to buy any overseas asset, or that any person has committed money laundering, hawala or fraud. The questions raised are questions for the investigating agencies and the courts, and this report calls on them to answer quickly.
