PMLA court grants bail to activist lawyer, brother, in alleged land-grab cases

A PMLA court granted bail to activist-lawyer Satish Uke and his brother in a money-laundering case linked to land-grabbing allegations.

MUMBAI: A special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court on Tuesday granted bail to activist-lawyer Satish Uke and his elder brother Pradip in the money-laundering case registered against them by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a land-grabbing case.

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Special judge R B Rote granted bail to the brothers primarily on the ground of their long pre-trial incarceration. “As the accused have undergone the detention of the minimum sentence of imprisonment as well as more than one half of the maximum period of imprisonment (seven years) specified for the offence punishable under Section 4 of the PMLA, they are entitled for grant of bail,” the court said.

The ED registered an ECIR against the Uke brothers in February 2022 on the basis of two alleged land-grabbing cases registered against them in Nagpur and arrested them on March 31, 2022.

One of the cases was registered on January 23, 2022, based on a complaint lodged by Mohammad Jaffar, nephew of the late Mohammed Samad, who alleged that the Uke brothers had usurped their five-acre land at Bokhara in Nagpur by creating fake documents.

The second FIR registered on July 31, 2018, is based on a complaint lodged by Shobharani Nalode, secretary of the Aishwari Sahakari Grih Nirman Sanstha, alleging that the brothers had usurped the society’s 1.5-acre land at Babulkheda in Nagpur.

Before his arrest, Uke was in the news after he filed a petition against chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, seeking initiation of criminal proceedings against him for the alleged “non-disclosure” of criminal cases in his election affidavit. He alleged that Fadnavis had filed a false affidavit in 2014 by hiding two criminal cases of cheating and forgery registered against him in 1996 and 1998.

Uke had also petitioned the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court seeking a police probe into the “suspicious and untimely” death of CBI judge B H Loya, who conducted the trial in fake encounter killing of Sohrabuddin Shaikh and his wife. Loya died in Nagpur in 2014.

Uke also represented Congress leader Nana Patole in his defamation suit against Director-General of Police and former state intelligence chief Rashmi Shukla and others for alleged illegal tapping of his mobile phones. A Pune court dismissed the defamation suit.