Hyderabad: Chief minister A. Revanth Reddy and three others have secured relief from the Appellate Tribunal under SAFEMA, which set aside an order confirming the Enforcement Directorate’s attachment of ₹50 lakh in the 2015 cash-for-vote case. The tribunal held that ED could not attach an equivalent amount when the alleged bribe money had already been seized and was lying in trial court custody.Revanth, Vem Krishna Keerthan, Rudra Sivakumar Uday Simha and Bishop Harry Sebastian had challenged the Adjudicating Authority’s Feb 8, 2022, order confirming ED’s provisional attachment on May 25, 2021. The New Delhi-based Appellate Tribunal headed by Justice Munishwar Nath Bhandari passed the order in their favour on Sept 14.The case stems from an FIR registered by the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB), Hyderabad, on May 31, 2015, over an alleged Rs 5 crore bribe offer ahead of the MLC election on June 1, 2015.Vem Narender Reddy, now an adviser to the CM, was the MLA candidate. CM Revanth Reddy, then a TDP MLA, was accused of offering a bribe to secure an MLA’s vote for Vem. Revanth, accompanied by Bishop Harry Sebastian and Rudra Uday Simha, was alleged to have offered Rs 50 lakh advance to MLA Elvis Stephenson on May 31, 2015, at an apartment in South Lalaguda, Secunderabad. It was alleged that Revanth, Sebastian, Uday Simha and Mathaiah Jerusalem sought to induce Stephenson to vote for the TDP candidate or abstain from voting.The ACB said that its City Range-1 DSP, assisted by Task Force police, caught the accused red-handed and seized the Rs 50 lakh advance. Audio and video recordings were also collected.Based on the scheduled offence, ED registered an ECIR and subsequently provisionally attached an equivalent Rs 50 lakh. Vem Krishna Keertan Reddy, son of Vem Narender Reddy, was named by the ED and ACB as an accused for allegedly helping supply and deal with the bribe money.During their appeal, counsel for Revanth Reddy and others argued that the alleged proceeds of crime were already beyond their reach as ACB had seized the cash and deposited it with the trial court. There was, therefore, no apprehension that they could deal with the money to frustrate its eventual confiscation under Section 5(1)(b) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.ED defended the equivalent-value attachment. Its counsel, however, could not dispute that the alleged bribe money had already been seized and remained in court custody.The tribunal observed that Section 5(1)(b) required an apprehension that the proceeds of crime were likely to be dealt with in a manner that could frustrate eventual confiscation. With the Rs 50 lakh secured in court, there was no likelihood of the appellants dealing with or alienating those funds, it said.It consequently held that ED could not provisionally attach an equivalent amount in these circumstances, set aside the confirmation order and disposed of all four appeals.
