Creditors of Reliance Communications have reportedly asked ED to release real estate assets worth ₹7,000 crore, saying the attachments are hindering recovery of dues running into tens of thousands of crores.
Creditors of Reliance Communications have reportedly petitioned the Enforcement Directorate to release real estate properties worth approximately ₹7,000 crore that remain under provisional attachment. The request centers on a familiar tension in India's insolvency cases: money-laundering attachments meant to preserve assets for eventual recovery can end up freezing the very properties a company's legitimate creditors are trying to liquidate to get paid.
The ED attached 42 properties worth roughly ₹7,500 crore on October 31, 2025, through four separate provisional orders under PMLA, a figure close enough to this request's ₹7,000 crore that it's likely the specific tranche creditors are now asking to have released. That attachment round is tied to alleged diversion of loans taken from YES Bank between 2017 and 2019, and it notably included Anil Ambani's own family home in Pali Hill, Mumbai, alongside other residential and commercial properties across the group's real estate holdings.
Reliance Group has said the attachment has no material impact on the operations of its still-listed entities, Reliance Infrastructure and Reliance Power, since the affected properties belong to RCom specifically, which has been under Resolution Professional and Committee of Creditors control since well before this attachment. This isn't RCom's only brush with ED action either. The agency has pursued the company across multiple rounds since 2025, pushing the cumulative total across the wider Reliance Anil Ambani Group past ₹19,344 crore by mid-2026.
RCom has been under Corporate Insolvency Resolution Process since 2019, managed by a Resolution Professional under the supervision of the NCLT and a Committee of Creditors led by the State Bank of India. Lenders have claims exceeding ₹49,000 crore against the company, and years into this process, recovery has been minimal. RCom and its group companies reportedly borrowed a total outstanding around ₹40,185 crore from domestic and foreign lenders, loans nine banks have since classified as fraudulent, which is precisely what triggered the ED's involvement in the first place.
The creditors' argument, if this report is accurate, is straightforward: these real estate assets could be monetised to repay legitimate lenders through the insolvency process, and an ongoing PMLA attachment prevents that from happening regardless of how the underlying fraud investigation eventually concludes.
This is a genuinely difficult needle to thread for regulators. The ED's attachments exist to prevent assets tied to alleged financial crime from being dissipated before wrongdoing can be established and victims compensated. But when the same assets are also collateral that legitimate secured lenders are counting on to recover a fraction of tens of thousands of crores in dues, an attachment that runs for years without resolution effectively punishes creditors who did nothing wrong alongside the parties actually under investigation.
Whether the ED grants any release depends on where the underlying investigation stands and how confident the agency is that RCom's creditors, rather than parties linked to the alleged fraud, would be the actual beneficiaries of any released property. Given how slowly this case has moved since 2019, a quick resolution here would be the exception rather than the rule. Suraksha Group's ongoing effort to finish Jaypee Infratech's stalled housing projects is a useful comparison point, that case shows a stressed real estate asset can eventually move toward resolution, but only after years of legal and financial untangling well beyond what any single creditor request can resolve on its own.
