India News | Delhi Court Discharges 3 in Money Laundering Case
Get latest articles and stories on India at LatestLY. A Delhi court has discharged three accused in a money laundering case linked to allocation of Brinda, Sisai and Meral coal blocks in Jharkhand.
New Delhi, Sep 7 (PTI) A Delhi court has discharged three accused in a money laundering case linked to allocation of Brinda, Sisai and Meral coal blocks in Jharkhand.
The case against the accused — Manoj Jayaswal, Ramesh Jayaswal and Abhijeet Infrastructure Ltd. — relates to alleged laundering of about Rs 650 crore after wrongfully obtaining the letter of allocation from the Ministry of Coal.
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“There is no material on record to show that the accused have committed the offence of money laundering,” the judge said in an order passed on September 5.
The judge said an investigation was required in order to find out whether Abhijeet Infrastructure Limited committed the offence of cheating the consortium of banks led by the State Bank of India.
It is for the ED to consider the same and decide whether to take the matter forward, the judge said.
The court accepted defence advocate Vijay Agarwal's argument that the case was baseless as there was only one scenario in which the proceeds of crime could be stated to have been generated out of such an allocation and that was when the coal from the block was extracted, sold and the amount so generated got utilised.
“However, the ED could not show any property having been generated from the coal block in the first place,” he said.
The ED had alleged the company allotted shares at a premium that was multiple times more than their value and inflated its net worth from Rs 30 crore at the pre-allocation stage to about Rs 750 crore after getting the coal block allocated. On the basis of the inflated net worth, it obtained huge loans from banks.
The ED alleged that after de-allocation of the block, the net worth of Abhijeet Group came down to minus Rs 69 crore in the year 2018.
The ED's case arose from a CBI case related to obtaining coal blocks by using forged documents and by misrepresenting the company's status before the Screening Committee and Ministry of Steel and Ministry of Coal.
(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)