Holding that its prosecution case “does not disclose even the threshold of a prima facie suspicion, far less the grave suspicion mandated” by criminal jurisprudence, a special CBI court last week discharged all 23 accused booked by the agency for their alleged involvement in the case.
Those discharged include former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia and Telangana leader K Kavitha. In a sharply worded order, special CBI judge Jitendra Singh ruled that the conspiracy alleged by CBI is “nothing more than a speculative construct resting on conjecture and surmise, devoid of any admissible evidence”. The court also slammed CBI for proceeding on a “predetermined trajectory” and attempting to give credence to an otherwise “fragile narrative”.
CBI has already moved the Delhi High Court against the lower court order, challenging the discharge of Kejriwal, Sisodia and others. In its appeal, CBI has contended that the lower court order is patently illegal and perverse. And that the lower court has conducted a mini trial at the stage of charge. The high court is set to take up CBI’s appeal on Monday.
While the CBI case has ended for now, ED’s prosecution under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act still stands. As reported last week by ET, ED sources maintain that while the CBI court has discharged the accused in the predicate offence, their money laundering case still stands.
ED sources had told ET that the standard of proof and evidentiary value conducted under PMLA is on a different footing than the CBI probe. Also, the legal issue of whether PMLA is a standalone offence is pending in the Supreme Court, they had added.
The accused discharged in the CBI case are likely to move a formal application in the court, seeking a quietus to the ED case. People in the know told ET that the accused are likely to contend that the discharge by the special CBI court is a discharge on merit and not a discharge on technical grounds.The accused may also seek refuge in the Supreme Court’s ‘Vijay Madanlal Choudhary’ judgement in July 2022 to argue that once a predicate offence has not been proved against the accused, the PMLA case automatically extinguishes, people quoted above added.
In an almost 600-page judgment, the special CBI Judge had held that “the prosecution case is rendered legally infirm, unsustainable and unfit to proceed any further in law. Stated differently, this court records that the theory of an overarching conspiracy, so emphatically projected, stands completely dismantled when tested against the evidentiary record”.
