New Delhi: The central agency Enforcement Directorate (ED) Friday withdrew its petition filed under Article 32 before the Supreme Court in which it had asked the top court to transfer two people, accused in the coal scam case, to any other jail outside Chhattisgarh.
Senior advocate and additional solicitor general S.V. Raju appeared for ED before a bench led by Justice Suryakant Sharma and told him he had instructions to withdraw the writ petition. An Article 32 petition is a remedy available under the Constitution for enforcement of fundamental rights, in case there is a violation or deprivation.
Filed on 5 October 2023, the petition sought transfer for Suryakant Tiwari and Sunil Agarwal, facing money-laundering charges in the alleged coal scam case unearthed in Chhattisgarh in 2022. While Tiwari was arrested in October 2022, Agarwal was in ED’s custody in November 2022. ED accused the two of running a parallel system to collect illegal levies on coal.
Though both Tiwari and Agarwal have been in judicial custody, ED wanted them moved out of Chhattisgarh because they were hospitalised for a substantial part of their judicial custody.
The ED petition, which ThePrint has accessed, says Tiwari spent 203 of the 252 days of judicial custody in a private hospital. As for Agarwal, he remained in the hospital for 68 days out of the total 240 days of judicial custody that was imposed on him.
A judicial custody order is passed by the judge designated to hear ED cases. According to the agency’s petition, Tiwari and Agarwal’s hospitalisation was “without any genuine cause or reason”.
The other ground on which the ED wanted Tiwari and Agarwal to be lodged in another state jail was the absence of CCTV cameras in the hospital rooms that were allotted to them, and the special facilities that were extended to them, the non-maintenance of visitors register and non-deployment of guards outside their rooms.
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The ED claimed that Tiwari and Agarwal were highly influential people, economically and politically, and that their hospitalisation, during judicial custody, was carried out in a “pre-planned manner”.
“Accused keeps shuffling from one department of the hospitals to the other department indicating non-genuine reporting and are investing disease to prolong hospital stay to spend time outside the jail,” read the ED petition.
The ED’s submission Friday comes nearly two months after a new government was formed in Chhattisgarh in December 2023. Until then, the ED and the erstwhile Congress government in Chhattisgarh were embroiled in a bitterly contested litigation in connection with the central agency’s probe undertaken in the state, with the coal scam being one of them.
With some of its crucial bureaucrats under scanner, and some even arrested, the Chhattisgarh government had come out in support of its officers in the Supreme Court, accusing the ED of harassing them. The state had also filed a petition challenging section 50 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002 and the powers conferred by the anti-money laundering statute on the central probe agency.
The Congress’ Bhupesh Baghel government had also alleged in the petition that the central investigating agencies were misused to “intimidate, harass and disturb” the governance in non-BJP ruled states. The face-off between the two had prompted the Supreme Court to put the ED probe on hold in some cases.
The coal scam case, in which the ED withdrew its petition on Friday, emanated from a search and seizure action taken by the income tax department against Tiwari and Agarwal. On 12 July 2022, the IT department lodged an FIR against the two under various sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), including criminal conspiracy.
Later, section 384 of IPC — which relates to extortion and punishment — was added in September 2022. Since section 384 is a predicate offence under PMLA, the ED registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR). Predicate or Scheduled offences are defined under Section 2(y) of PMLA, which mandates the ED to probe the money-laundering aspect in such cases.
In December 2023, the top court dismissed the bail petition of a senior bureaucrat of the Chhattisgarh government, Saumya Chaurasia. Posted as a deputy secretary with the Baghel government, Chaurasia said ED arrested her despite her cooperation in the investigation.
She further argued that the extortion and criminal conspiracy charges had been dropped in the chargesheet, which was filed by the Karnataka police before a local court.
The ED opposed Chaurasia’s plea and described her to be one of the key persons in the Rs 540 crore racket allegedly run by Tiwari.
However, the SC rejected Chaurasia’s petition to hold that: “When the FIR is registered under particular offences which include the offences mentioned in the schedule to the PMLA, it is the court of competent jurisdiction, which would decide whether the charge is required to be framed against the accused for the scheduled offence or not.”
(Edited by Tikli Basu)