Former CM Hooda questions maintainability of ED plea in High Court

Nearly a year after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) moved the Punjab and Haryana high court challenging PMLA special court’s order staying the trial proceedings against former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, his counsel claimed that the petition was not maintainable.

Appearing before Justice Tribhuvan Dahiya’s Bench, senior counsel R. S. Cheema contended on Hooda’s behalf that the ED’s petition was not maintainable. Elaborating, he stated that only four of the 22 accused have been impleaded as party to the petition. “In case the petition is allowed, all of them would be affected,” he added. Advocates Arshdeep Singh Cheema, Pardeep Singh Poonia and Satish Sharma also appeared for Hooda.

The Bench was also told during the course of hearing that impugned order was passed on an application filed not by Hooda, but some other accused. Hooda had not filed the said application seeking stay. The ED arrayed him as a party, while not impleading all other accused.

Additional Solicitor-General of India S. V. Raju and special counsel Zoheb Hossain in ED’s behalf sought “a short accommodation to get instructions in that regard”. The case will now come up for further hearing on October 28

Among other things, the ED in its plea submitted that the matter pertained to allotment of industrial plots. Hooda, the then chairman of HUDA, kept the file with himself for finalisation of allotment criteria for a long duration. He misused his official position and changed the criteria on January 24, 2016, after the January 6, 2016, deadline for inviting the applications.

It was added that the allotment of plots was not made in accordance to the propose criteria. It was changed after the deadline had elapsed and the plots were allotted to ineligible applicants in a wrongful manner.

The ED, in its application, added that a prosecution complaint was filed before the special court at Panchkula in February 2021 after conducting through investigation under the provisions of PMLA. The court took complaint’s cognisance in February 2021. But the court, vide the impugned order dated May 15, paused the PMLA trial case proceedings “till the filing of the final report by the CBI”.

Going into the grounds for challenging the order, the Ed stated that the special judge erroneously ignored the fact that money laundering offence was independent and separate. As such, the stay on trial proceedings, on the basis of stay on the proceedings related to the scheduled offence, was bad in law.

It was added that the special court, while passing the impugned order, ignored the statutory provisions, which category provide that trial under the PMLA would not be dependent upon any other order passed in “respect of the schedules offence and the same shall be conducted separately”.

It was added that there was no embargo on continuing the trial proceedings under the PMLA pending the filing of the final report by the “predicate agency” as it is “imbibed in the scheme of PMLA that the trial for the offence of money laundering and scheduled offences are separate and independent of each other.

The plea added halting the trial under the PMLA “until the filing of the final report in the scheduled offence would have serious consequences on pending PMLA trials across the country. This would lead to thwarting of meritorious money laundering cases at the threshold and would adversely impact the interest of the directorate”.