Farmers Movement Archive

High court grants bail to Punjab Congress leader Sukhpal Khaira in money laundering case

The Punjab and Haryana high court on Thursday granted bail to Congress leader Sukhpal Singh Khaira who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case in November last year. Khaira, who is lodged in the Patiala jail and is Congress candidate from the Bholath segment for the Punjab assembly elections, had moved the HC seeking bail on December 13 after his bail petition was dismissed a week earlier. The bench of Justice Sureshwar Thakur observed, “When the offence under the money laundering law is directly linked with the predicate offence and that the matter is pending in the apex court, the high court, prima facie, cannot firmly draw an objective conclusion that the money drawn in the drug case also resulted in committing an offence under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Khaira was told to surrender his passport and appear in the trial court when hearing in the case is fixed. He was also told not to leave Punjab and Haryana without the trial court’s permission. The ED had raided Khaira’s premises in March 2021 and later initiated proceedings in connection with a first information report (FIR) registered in a 2015 drug case. A court had convicted four persons and by the same order, Khaira was summoned as additional accused in 2017.Claims political vendettaKhaira, who joined the Congress in June last year, has maintained that the proceedings against him were part of a political vendetta. Khaira claimed that the ED’s action was a case of witch-hunt as he had been vocal against the Centre’s three farm laws which were later repealed. The ED had initiated proceedings under the PMLA in January even as there was a stay from the Supreme Court in the 2015 matter, he had claimed.The ED opposed the bail claiming that Khaira was an accomplice of drug case convicts and fake passport racketeers. Also, a special ED court in Mohali on Thursday allowed him to come out of jail to file nomination as a candidate on January 31.

Hindustan Times

28-01-2022

Chandigarh