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India's Enforcement Directorate (ED) is involved in a rapidly increasing number of cases where money laundering is alleged and it is not afraid to go after high-profile, well connected, targets. But the latest case to gain publicity is even more sensitive than others. And the ED is finding itself the target of unwelcome attacks by some of India's most powerful people.

India's Directorate of Revenue Intelligence has had a string of successes of identifying cash couriers and confiscating large sums at borders. The methods used by the carriers are instructive.

For much of the past 25 years, Nigel Morris-Cotterill has argued that any corporate structure that goes is more than three layers deep should be regarded as prima facie suspicious unless a good commercial and legal reason can be established. Incredible India, which is turning from a sink hole for dirty money into a leader in developing structures and policies to combat financial crime has just announced that Indian groups will not be permitted to have more than two layers of subsidiaries. That's going to cause major consternation amongst Indian corporates which use complex structures to minimise tax revenues and to avoid exchange control measures, as well as to hide proceeds of fraud and other offences.

When the most powerful anti-corruption body in a country as big and as corrupt as India tells banks to shape up and go back on dodgy deals to ensure recovery, the results may turn out to be shocking.

When India decided to remove, without warning, two large value notes from circulation and cancel their legality, Economists chugged their drinks and were delighted that India would be pulling back into some kind of order the unsustainable position that the vast majority of the money in circulation was held outside the banking sector, in cash. But behind the scenes, there was a shadow hunting through the depths of the data that the exercise generated. And now that shadow is found to have some large and sharp teeth.

India's national financial crime investigative service, the Enforcement Directorate, has dramatically increased the number of money laundering prosecutions it is bringing.

A report in India Today says that "only 3 to 5 per cent of the [hawala] trade is functioning now."

Forgive us for being sceptical.

Also, we are quietly irritated by the Indian media's habit of equating hawala with money laundering and, in some cases, saying they are the same.