CHENNAI: The Enforcement Directorate , which enforces the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), has provisionally attached properties worth Rs 12,000 crore in the last 15 months, believed to be the proceeds of laundered money, data released by the government shows. This is more than what the department attached in the decade from 2005.In a written reply to an unstarred question on Friday, minister of state for finance Santosh Kumar Gangwar said that in the last one year, properties worth Rs 11,032.27 crore were attached by the ED after issuing 175 Provisional Attachment Orders (PAO). In comparison, the total value of assets attached from 2005-2015 was Rs 9003.26 crore, statistics on ED website show. In the first three months of the current financial year, Rs 965.84 crore has been attached. The total cumulative attachments would be around Rs 22,000 crore as of June 30 this year, said sources in the department. The figures of properties attached in 2016-17 zoomed due to the Vijay Mallya case, in which properties worth close to Rs 10,000 crore were attached, sources said.More than half of the total searches and a third of the total arrests by the department across the country were effected in the last 15 months, statistics show. Some of these highprofile cases and searches were in Tamil Nadu; for instance the Sekhar Reddy case and Madurai granite mining. The ED is an organisation which goes after big names accused of corruption. The PMLA is a stringent law, where the onus is on the accused to prove that the attached properties are bought from known sources of income, say sources. The ED has been given a free hand to dig up dirty money, said sources. This, they added, reflected in the figures.Sources in the department said that these measures were taken in coordination with other investigative agencies like Income Tax Investigation Wing and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI). A task force on shell companies had been created by the ministry of corporate affairs which involves all these departments. The ED is tracking shell companies through which crores of rupees are transferred out of the country. In April, ED sleuths arrested in Chennai a 36-year-old man who had allegedly routed Rs 78 crore through six shell companies.As of July 12, 1.62 lakh shell companies had been struck off the Registrar of Companies (RoC). Of these, 52,391 or 32% were from the southern states.On April 6, the ED had conducted a co-ordinated nationwide search at 18 premises across 10 states and filed cases against government servants, including Employees Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) officials in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.