New Delhi: Is ED “completely shut out” from prosecuting money-laundering cases in situations where accused were acquitted in predicate or scheduled offences?
On Tuesday, ED raised this issue before Supreme Court, which agreed to look into the independent nature of ED’s laundering probe and whether an acquittal in a predicate offence can mean the offence of laundering can’t exist.
According to information shared with Parliament on Tuesday, the govt said since 2005, ED has filed closure reports in more than 1,278 PMLA cases, even when it had filed chargesheets in so me of them.
Many of these closure reports are as a result of “hostile” state police filing closure of predicate offences (police FIRs), and in some cases where trial courts have quashed the predicate offence.
The existence of a predicate offence, a police FIR or a case registered by CBI, is a prerequisite for the ED to initiate any probe under PMLA. Once a state police files closure of a predicate offence, the ED case automatically collapses.
In a written response to a question in Rajya Sabha, minister of state for finance Pankaj Chaudhary said that since 2019, ED has filed closure reports before a special PMLA court in 93 cases where no offence of money-laundering is made out.
These are “due to various reasons such as closure of schedule offence case, cases where the predicate offence court finds no offence committed related to schedule offence defined under PMLA, quashing of predicate offence case etc”. Prior to 2019, the ED had closed 1,185 cases where no money-laundering offence was made, with the prior approval of the regional special director of the agency.
