Mumbai: A special PMLA court on Monday granted bail to Hrishikesh Deshmukh, the younger son of former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh, in connection with the money laundering case registered against the 73-year-old Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader.
Special judge RN Rokade granted Hrishikesh bail primarily in view of the fact that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) did not find it necessary to arrest him in the money laundering case and filed the main chargesheet as well as supplementary chargesheet without arresting him.
The court ordered Hrishikesh to be released on bail on furnishing personal bond of ₹3 lakh and one or two sureties in the same amount. The special court also directed him to deposit his passport with the ED.
ED had on May 11 last year registered the money laundering case based on the FIR registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation on April 21, 2021, after former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh accused him of trying to extort money from bar owners in Mumbai through some police officials, including dismissed assistant inspector Sachin Vaze.
In a letter written to then Maharashtra chief minister Uddhav Thackeray and others on March 20, 2021, Singh alleged that Deshmukh had instructed certain Mumbai police officers, including Vaze, to collect an amount of ₹100 crore every month from owners of bars and restaurants in Mumbai.
The agency claimed that Waze had accordingly called a meeting of bar owners, and between December 2020 and February 2021, collected ₹4.7 crore from the owners of orchestra bars in Mumbai and handed over the “extorted money” in two instalments to Deshmukh’s personal assistant Kundan Shinde.
Hrishikesh was accused of having played a role in allegedly diverting part of these funds through Delhi-based agents to bring in the tainted money into banking channels by way of donations to an educational trust controlled by Deshmukh family.
In his plea, Hrishikesh had contended that his father, the prime accused in the case, had been granted bail by the Bombay high court on October 4, and the order was upheld by the Supreme Court.
He claimed that the high court held that in absence of the acquisition of any property through the scheduled offence, the allegations of money laundering are not only untenable but also a perversity in the eyes of law.
“In any event, the applicant (Hrishikesh) is neither named in the scheduled/predicate offence nor has any role to play in any act of omission or commission that may have been attributed to his father,” his bail plea stated. “Even otherwise, the accusations being levelled against the applicant are mis-founded,” it added.