MUMBAI: The Bombay High Court granted bail to Mangaldas Vitthalrao Bandal, a wrestler turned politician in Pune, and another accused in the alleged Shivajirao Bhosale Cooperative Bank money laundering case. The court stated that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) “cannot be given a leeway to reclaim” their liberty on the grounds of their own delay in starting the investigation. The High Court questioned the necessity and timing of their belated arrest in 2024 by the ED, four years after registering its case.
The Pune Shivaji Nagar police registered a case in 2020 of alleged cheating and embezzlement of investors’ funds. Based on the Pune police FIR, the ED lodged its case against them under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), based on the predicate offence. Both were arrested for the FIR and released on bail before their arrest by the ED last year.
Justice Milind Jadhav, in a March 11 order, held that now that they secured their liberty after “the hard turmoil of litigation process,” the ED cannot seek to snatch that. He noted that despite both the FIR and PMLA case being registered in 2020, the agency did not find it necessary to arrest them for four years.
Senior counsel Aabad Ponda for Bandal argued that the politician was arrested after a substantial four years by the ED, during which the agency had the opportunity to secure his custody for interrogation while he was already in custody for 20 months in the alleged fraud case. Ponda said, at such a belated stage, there was no necessity for Bandal’s judicial custody. Kemdhare’s counsel, Akhilesh Dubey, echoed Ponda’s arguments.
For the ED, public prosecutor H S Venegaonkar, “while vehemently resisting both the Bail Applications,” argued that the High Court must consider the PMLA offence as a “distinct offence” and must also count the time spent in custody following the ED arrest separately. Both spent merely months in the alleged money laundering case, said the public prosecutor, hence it cannot be considered ‘long incarceration,’ argued Venegaonkar, advocating for the rejection of bail pleas.
The police arrested Bandal in June 2021 for the alleged fraud case. He spent 20 months in custody before getting bail in February 2023. The ED then arrested him in August 2024. The second bail applicant, Hanumant Kemdhare, who worked with the bank, was arrested first by Pune police for the FIR in September 2021 and released on bail in March 2024, only to be arrested again, this time by the ED in September 2024. The High Court said, “even after the date of their release on bail for a substantial period of time, the prosecution agency did not feel the need to arrest the Applicants.
The need and necessity to arrest the Applicants at the belated stage prima facie raises a serious question mark on the timing of the arrest, rather on the arrest itself.”
Venegaonkar, the ED prosecutor, contended that the period spent in custody in the predicate FIR cannot be counted. Justice Jadhav said it was “crucial” to note that an offence under the PMLA case emanates from the predicate offence, leading to an ED probe. The High Court did not agree with the prosecutor that the sentence undergone by the Applicants under the predicate offence should be treated distinctly and separately from the one under the PMLA offence.
However, Justice Jadhav said the issue of whether the incarceration be considered as a whole or in a vacuum cannot be gone into by the court in a bail plea. The High Court said since both accused seemed to have cooperated with the investigation, the ED could not justify their arrest and continued detention. The court directed their release on bonds of Rs 50,000 each