Fraud in the Chandigarh Tricity: One Business Model Connects the Biggest Cases, From PACL to Zirakpur

Fraud news from Chandigarh keeps returning to a single business model: the assured return. Pay now, and the scheme — a land plot, a commercial unit, a shop floor — will pay you back a fixed percentage, every quarter, no matter what. The largest attachment order in the Enforcement Directorate’s history and a 2026 High Court order about a Zirakpur project are, on the record, the same promise at two different scales.

The ED’s biggest attachment names a Chandigarh company

In February 2026 the Directorate of Enforcement issued what it described as its biggest single attachment order: 247 immovable properties worth Rs 10,021.46 crore, provisionally attached under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in its investigation of Chandigarh-based PACL Limited — the Pearls group. The attached land sits where the group grew: SAS Nagar (Mohali), Rupnagar and Zirakpur in Punjab. With this order, the agency’s cumulative attachments in the case reached approximately Rs 17,610 crore, including assets abroad.

The underlying scheme, in the ED’s description, collected on the order of Rs 48,000 crore from tens of millions of investors against promises of allotted plots and assured appreciation — land-linked instruments that SEBI had years earlier held to be unregistered collective investment schemes and ordered wound up. The refund side runs separately: a Supreme Court–appointed committee headed by a former Chief Justice of India has been selling assets and processing investor claims in ascending slabs, smallest claims first, through its published process at sebipaclrefund.co.in. No agent, and no fee, is part of that process.

For a Tricity reader the geography is the point. This is not a distant scandal: the attached properties are the region’s own land bank, and the investors the scheme reached first were households across Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.

2026, Zirakpur: the same promise, one project at a time

In July 2026 the Punjab and Haryana High Court refused regular bail to a director of Robus Landcorp Private Limited, an accused in a case concerning the “Roselyn Square” commercial project on Zirakpur’s airport road corridor. The complaint: investors were induced to put Rs 5.44 crore into commercial units on the assurance of 15 per cent annual returns, payable quarterly in advance until possession — promised fully furnished by January 2024 — and lease rentals thereafter. The returns stopped; possession did not come.

The court’s reasoning is what makes the order matter beyond one project. It held that allegations of cheating, forgery, criminal breach of trust and conspiracy take a matter beyond a mere RERA dispute over delayed possession — noting the investigating agency had collected prima facie material, including electronic chats allegedly acknowledging cash payments. In plain terms: an assured-return deal gone wrong is not automatically just a refund claim before a regulator; on facts like these it is a criminal case, and bail was refused on that footing.

These are allegations at trial stage, not findings of guilt, and the accused contest them. But the pattern the two cases bracket is the Tricity’s own: Mohali and Zirakpur’s commercial corridors have run for years on assured-return sales — a model SEBI has repeatedly warned against and which local reporting has documented persisting despite those warnings. An assured return on an unbuilt unit is not an investment feature. It is the seller borrowing from you at a rate no bank would offer, secured by nothing but the brochure.

Reading a Tricity deal before you sign

• An assured return is a red flag, not a perk. If the pitch leads with a guaranteed percentage rather than the asset, you are being sold a yield the project’s own economics may never support. SEBI has banned unregistered schemes built this way; the promise survives in private builder-buyer agreements precisely because no regulator has approved it.
• Check the project on the right RERA. The Tricity spans three regulators: rera.punjab.gov.in (Zirakpur, Mohali, Kharar), haryanarera.gov.in (Panchkula), and rera.chandigarh.gov.in (Chandigarh UT). Registration, sanctioned plans and the promoter’s disclosures are all searchable.
• Cash acknowledged on WhatsApp is still cash. The High Court noted chat messages allegedly acknowledging cash payments. Cash components leave you with a claim you can prove only the hard way; pay traceably or walk away.
• Commercial units are not consumer-protected the way flats are. Much of the Tricity’s assured-return selling is commercial — shops, food courts, studio units — where remedies are narrower. The contract is the protection; read it as if the returns will stop, because in the cases above they did.

Where to file, by what happened

• PACL investors: the committee’s official portal, sebipaclrefund.co.in — and nowhere else. Anyone charging to “process” a Pearls refund is the second fraud.
• Delay or refund on a registered project: the RERA for your district, above.
• Assured returns stopped, cheating or forgery alleged: FIR with the district police — Mohali and Zirakpur cases run through SAS Nagar; the Roselyn Square order shows these are treated as criminal matters, not mere delay.
• Deposit-taking or investment schemes: sachet.rbi.org.in.
• Online payment frauds: cybercrime.gov.in or helpline 1930.
• Consumer claims: edaakhil.nic.in; helpline 1915.

For how these enforcement machines fit together nationally, see the homebuyer’s enforcement map; for the deepest court interventions, the Delhi NCR record; and for enforcement reaching actual restitution, Lucknow.

Sources and attribution

The enforcement facts on this page are taken from public records: court and tribunal orders, FIRs registered by investigating agencies, attachment and arrest communications of the Directorate of Enforcement, orders and published figures of state real-estate regulatory authorities, and police communications as reported. Where this page describes a finding of a court, it is a finding. Where it describes an FIR, a prosecution complaint, an attachment or a regulator’s allegation, it is an accusation or an interim measure — not a conviction, and not a determination of guilt.

A note on names

Companies are named on this page only as they appear in public orders, FIRs or official releases, with that attribution. No individual is named. Where a company shares part of its name with other, unrelated businesses, nothing on this page refers to those unrelated businesses.

Right of reply

Every company named on this page is invited to respond. If any figure, date, name or description here is inaccurate, write to us with the correcting document and we will publish the correction, or the response in full, alongside this article without charge and without editing its substance.

No recovery agents

Cases like these attract people offering, for a fee, to recover stuck money. No government agency charges a victim to be treated as a victim, and no private service can release money attached by a court. Use the official channels listed above. Oquilia takes no fee from readers, offers no recovery service, and refers no one to any legal practice.