Fri, May 09, 2025
Who Will Be The Next ED Chief? The Guessing Game Begins
Central Board of Direct Taxes Chairman Nitin Gupta, CBDT Member Pravin Kumar, and Seemanchal Das, Enforcement Directorate's Special Director, are the names doing the rounds for the ED chief's post after the top court ruling
Jul 12, 2023 · 2 min read
A guessing game has begun in New Delhi, with several names doing the rounds after the Supreme Court struck down the tenure extensions granted to Sanjay Kumar Mishra, Director of the Enforcement Directorate (ED), and asked the government to appoint a new chief by July 31.
The names being touted are Nitin Gupta, the current chairman of the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT), its recently appointed Member Pravin Kumar, and Seemanchal Das, who is serving as the Special Director in the ED.
Gupta seems to be ahead in the race to helm the powerful anti-graft agency, which is probing some of the most sensitive corruption cases involving political leaders across several opposition parties.
A 1986-batch IRS officer of the Income Tax cadre, Gupta has been running the CBDT, the apex policymaking body of the income tax, for over a year. He is scheduled to superannuate in 2024, but if moved to the ED, he would have a fixed tenure of two years.
Before his elevation as a CBDT member, Pravin Kumar (IRS-IT, 1987 batch), served as the Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax in Pune. He had also held the crucial post of the Director General (Intelligence and Criminal Investigation) of Income Tax (DGIT) in Ahmedabad, as additional charge.
The central government had urged the Supreme Court to allow S K Mishra (IRS-IT, 1984-batch) to continue until November 30, during the hearings in a batch of petitions filed by the non-profit organization Common Cause and a bunch of leaders like Congress party’s Jaya Thakur and Ranjit Singh Surjewala and Trinamool Congress (TMC) party’s Mahua Moitra and Saket Gokhale.
However, the three judge bench on Tuesday rejected the government’s submission and also ruled as illegal the two earlier extensions granted to Mishra, saying they violated an earlier ruling.
The court had held in 2021 that Mishra should not be given any further extension and yet the Centre had done so by amending the Central Vigilance Commission Act and the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act, granting two extensions of a year each to him since then.
However, the top court upheld the amendments made to the two Acts, which would now allow the Centre to extend the tenure of the heads of the ED and the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) by up to five years.
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