Stung by a Mumbai court’s rejection of its plea for custodial interrogation of Hasan Ali Khan, the Enforcement Directorate today moved the Supreme Court challenging refusal of its plea against the Pune-based stud farm owner allegedly involved in stashing huge amount of black money abroad.
A Bench of Mr Justices B. Sudershan Reddy and S.S. Nijjar would take up the plea at 2 p.m.
The Bench had earlier chided the Centre for failing to subject Mr Khan and other alleged money launderers to custodial interrogation.
In pursuant of the apex court’s direction, the ED had moved a remand application before the court of Principal Sessions Judge Mr M.L. Tahaliyani on March 11, which, however, rejected the Directorate’s plea on the ground that the agency could not gather sufficient material in justification of its plea.
On March 11, the ED had suffered a major setback when Judge Mr Tahaliyani rejected its plea for Mr Khan’s 14-day custodial interrogation and granted him bail after observing the contents of some of its “confidential” documents were “available in Wikipedia’’.
Mr Khan is facing a Rs 70,000-crore tax demand notice from the Income-Tax Department as well as the ED probe.
The ED had arrested 53-year-old Khan on March 7 after being pulled up by the Supreme Court for its failure to ensure his custodial interrogation.
While rejecting the ED’s remand application, Judge Mr Tahaliyani had observed that had it had failed to back its charges in a money laundering case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
“No material evidence has been presented by the ED that shows any scheduled offence has been committed by Khan,” Mr Tahaliyani had observed, ordering that Mr Khan be enlarged on conditional bail.
He, however, barred Mr Khan from leaving the city for the next five days during which he was directed to report to the ED office every day.
The court had also rejected the argument that $7,00,000 was transferred from Mr Khan’s Sarasin Bank account in Switzerland to the account of S K Financial Services based in United Kingdom maintained by Barclays Bank London through Citi bank New York and accepted the defence lawyer I.P. Bagadia’ s contention that the account holder was one Mr H.A. Kahn and not Mr Khan (Hasan Ali Khan).
On the charge that Mr Khan had hoarded $8 billion in UBS, Switzerland, something which the bank has denied, the Mumbai court had said there was no material to show that money was transferred to UBS and that tainted money was shown as untainted.