The Delhi High Court on Tuesday adjourned till March 10 the hearing on a plea filed by Karnataka Deputy Chief Minister D K Shivakumar seeking to quash the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) money laundering probe arising out of a disproportionate assets case.
The division bench of Justice Navin Chawla and Justice Ravinder Dudeja deferred the hearing after the senior counsel appearing for Shivakumar sought time. “List on March 10,” the bench ordered.
Shivakumar had approached the high court in 2022 challenging the validity of the Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) registered by the ED in 2020. The ECIR stemmed from a 2020 FIR filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in Bangalore, alleging that Shivakumar and his family members possessed assets disproportionate to their known sources of income during the check period from April 1, 2013, to April 30, 2018.
The senior Congress leader contended that the money laundering probe amounted to a re-investigation of the same allegations already examined by the ED in a previous case lodged in 2018, and hence violated the principles against double jeopardy and constituted an abuse of legal process.
In his submissions through advocates Mayank Jain, Parmatma Singh, and Madhur Jain, Shivakumar argued that the second ECIR was mala fide and a tool for political vendetta.
However, the ED, in its counter-affidavit, denied the allegations of re-investigation and stated that the two ECIRs were based on entirely different facts and distinct scheduled offences. The first ECIR involved ₹8.59 crore and related to a conspiracy charge under Section 120B IPC, while the current one deals with disproportionate assets amounting to ₹74.93 crore and arises from a Prevention of Corruption Act case filed by the CBI.
The ED maintained that the case was at an investigative stage and the plea of double jeopardy was premature. It also asserted that no anticipatory relief should be granted in a writ petition challenging statutory provisions.
In a prior hearing on May 2, 2023, the court had recorded the ED’s submission that no coercive action would be taken against Shivakumar in the interim, and said the agency would be “bound” by that assurance.
