CBI court rejects bail plea of Anil Deshmukh in connection with corruption case

|HT|

A special Central Bureau of Investigation court on Monday rejected the bail plea of former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh, who is under arrest in connection with a corruption case registered in April 2021. Special judge SH Gwalani rejected the plea filed by the 73-year-old Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader through his counsel, advocate Aniket Nikam, who said they will peruse the order and decide about moving to a higher forum challenging the order.

Deshmukh, who was arrested by the CBI on April 6, approached the special court for a default bail, claiming that the central agency failed to file a complete charge sheet, as contemplated under Section 173(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, against him in stipulated time, and hence he was entitled to default bail. “An incomplete charge-sheet is filed by the investigating agency against the applicant (Deshmukh) and hence the applicant is entitled to invoke the remedy of statutory bail as contemplated under the provisions of section 167 (2) of the CrPC,” said the application filed by the 73-year-old NCP leader. Section 167(2) of the CrPC confers a right of bail on the accused if the investigating agency defaults in filing charge sheet within the time period stipulated in the section.

In Deshmukh’s case, the central agency filed the charge sheet on June 2 – well before the stipulated period of 60 days ended, but Deshmukh had claimed that it was incomplete.

“The investigation is said to be complete if sufficient material is collected by the investigating officer, based on which cognisance can be taken under Section 167 of the CrPC,” his plea said, adding that, “An incomplete charge sheet filed without completing the investigation cannot be used to defeat the right of statutory bail under Section 167(2) of the CrPC.” Relying on media reports, Deshmukh claimed that the CBI filed only a 59-page charge sheet against him. In this regard, his plea stated that, “by mere filing a compilation of 59 pages termed as a charge sheet, without completing the entire investigation and without filing a final and full-fledged charge sheet as understood under Section 173 CrPC, the prosecuting agency cannot subjugate the indefeasible statutory right of the applicant to claim default bail.”

The central agency on the other hand claimed that the charge sheet it filed satisfied the requirement of Section 173(2) of the CrPC.

Deshmukh was first arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on November 2, 2021, on the allegations of money laundering. The ED case against him is basis an FIR registered by the CBI on April 21, 2021, upon allegations of corruption levelled by former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh. In a letter written to Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and others on March 20, 2021, Singh alleged that Deshmukh instructed certain Mumbai police officers, including assistant inspector Sachin Vaze, to collect ₹100 crore every month from Mumbai’s restaurants and bars.

ED claimed that Vaze had accordingly called a meeting of bar owners, and between December 2020 and February 2021, collected ₹4.7 crore from the owners of orchestra bars in Mumbai and handed over the “extorted money” in two instalments to Deshmukh’s personal assistant Kundan Shinde.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)