Court pulls up ED for weak case against Hasan

A Mumbai court on Wednesday pulled up the Enforcement Directorate (ED), after it failed to show that Pune businessman Hasan Ali Khan used forged passports to earn black money. HT reports.

A Mumbai court on Wednesday pulled up the Enforcement Directorate (ED), after it failed to show that Pune businessman Hasan Ali Khan used forged passports to earn black money.

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The court, however, remanded Khan to ED custody for another day while asking the agency to come prepared before it on Thursday.

"You want to interrogate him for what offence (sic)," ML Tahliyani, the principal judge at the sessions court said, while refusing to link the passport case with his earnings that he had allegedly stashed abroad.

"Did he make his earning from these passports," Tahliyani said when the public prosecutor tried to tell the court that there was an offence registered against him for cheating and forgery in connection with obtaining a fake passport at Patna.

The court asked the prosecution to prove that a "scheduled crime has taken place from which there have been tainted proceeds but which have been shown as untainted." The court also said, "Prove at least one of these points before making a case for custody."

The agency had initially failed to book Khan under PMLA, as it could not prove that the black money he was holding was proceeds of a scheduled offence, which is the main criterion for booking someone under the Act. The Act lists certain scheduled offences and a person earning black money using any of these offences could be booked under PMLA.

ED applied PMLA on Khan only in 2009 much after the Mumbai police booked him for cheating and passport forgery.