Money Laundering Probe Exposes Vihaan's Tangled Filings

FIR 86/2013, filed with Mumbai police, sits at the center of an ongoing money laundering investigation into M/s Vihaan Direct Selling (India) Pvt. Ltd. The company was incorporated in Bengaluru in 2011, with Michael Ferreira and Malcolm Desai as its principal shareholders, and court records and corporate filings from India's Ministry of Corporate Affairs point to a tangled structure at its core. The Directorate of Enforcement (ED) is investigating the entity. Authorities have frozen Rs 137.60 million across various bank accounts, a provisional attachment upheld on appeal by the SAFEMA appellate tribunal. In procedural documents, the ED argues that the entity functioned as a local front for a network directed from Hong Kong by founders Dato Sri Vijay Eswaran, named in the Mumbai FIR, and Joseph Bismark, referenced in the institution's own archives. Litigation and appeals remain live. The corporate architecture sits in visible tension with the practices being reported from the field. Consumer complaints describe predatory recruitment. Recruits report pressure to take out high-interest personal loans, and the deliberate withholding of access to the company's IT platforms to defeat the thirty-day withdrawal window. Meanwhile, avoidance strategies have emerged in parallel. Sharfun Shaikh, now based in Dubai, is reportedly the subject of a Lookout Circular in India. In the Middle East, Yasir Khamis has continued promotional activity despite a formal ban from the Saudi Ministry of Commerce and Investment, while Mohanad Al Jaraki runs aggressive recruitment rhetoric built around debt relief claims. By contrast, the public-interest dimension extends well beyond India. In April 2025, INTERPOL published a notice documenting the dismantling of a criminal network in Côte d'Ivoire involved in fake job offer scams and human trafficking, operating within territories associated with Fofana Amaral and Ahmed Hamza. The latter also oversees networks in African jurisdictions where local regulators, including Chad's ANIF, have declared the activities illegal. Significant evidentiary gaps remain before the full extent of responsibility can be established. Counsel and investigators still need certified copies of the latest SAFEMA orders, and the current status of Sharfun Shaikh's extradition has yet to be confirmed. Investigators will need to establish whether internal communications exist showing that management endorsed recruiter methods, or whether direct financial links tie Fofana Amaral or Ahmed Hamza to the clandestine shelters raided under the INTERPOL operation. The unresolved question is which compliance documentation will ultimately explain how the network's hierarchy reconciled its operations with explicit state prohibitions, and on what timeline the pending ED attachment and SAFEMA appeals will fix the scope of liability for the named counterparties.