HC grants bail to key accused in ₹494 crore Shivajirao Bhosale bank fraud case

The Bombay High Court granted bail to Suryaji Jadhav in a ₹494 crore fraud case, citing long pre-trial detention and rights under the Constitution.

MUMBAI: The Bombay high court on Thursday granted bail to Suryaji Jadhav, arrested by the enforcement directorate (ED) in connection with the alleged ₹494 crore fraud at Shivajirao Bhosale Cooperative Bank, Pune.

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A single judge bench of justice Madhav Jamdar granted bail to the 72-year-old primarily given his long pre-trial incarceration and the trial not likely to start shortly. ED had arrested him on February 24, 2020, claiming that his liability in the entire fraud was to the extent of ₹79 crore.

Jadhav had approached the high court after the special PMLA court rejected his bail plea, though he has already been granted bail in the predicate offence. His counsel pointed out to the high court that Jadhav had already undergone over half of the maximum sentence – 7 years imprisonment – prescribed for the offence of money laundering and therefore he was entitled to bail under Section 436A of the Criminal Procedure Code.

Justice Jamdar accepted the argument and said, “Despite restrictive statutory provisions like Section 45 of the PMLA Act, the right of the undertrial accused under Article 21 of the Constitution of India cannot be allowed to be infringed.”

“In such a situation, statutory restrictions will not come in the way of the Court to grant bail to protect the fundamental rights of the accused,” the court added. The court further noted that regarding the scheduled offence, about 256 witnesses were proposed to be examined by the prosecution, and in the money laundering case, the ED had proposed to investigate 9 additional witnesses against the accused persons in the case.

“The charge sheet in both cases is voluminous. It is an admitted position that both cases will be tried simultaneously. Thus, this is a case where the trial is unlikely to conclude any time soon and will take a considerably long time,” said the court.

The ED launched the money laundering probe based on an FIR registered by the Shivajinagar police station in Pune on January 8, 2020, following complaint lodged by the statutory auditor of the co-operative bank. The auditor had found over ₹71,78 crore cash missing from the bank.

It was alleged that the people at the helm of affairs embezzled the depositors’ money. “The Key Managerial Persons of the Bank treated the bank and its funds as their family concern and utilized the siphoned funds for personal gains,” an ED source said.

ED’s probe has revealed that the key managerial persons allegedly utilized disbursed loan amounts for their own benefit by giving approvals to irregular loan cases, thereby resulting in 97 per cent or ₹392.92 crore of the loans turning into Non-Performing Assets (NPA).