Anshika Tiwari-
The Kerala Government moved to the High Court challenging latter’s order where it quashed the two FIR’s filed by the state’s police against ED officials. The said FIR’s were lodged against ED officials for allegedly forcing the key accused in the gold smuggling case to implicate CM Pinarayi Vijayan in the matter.
The state government filed the appeal against the order passed by a single bench on April 16 on two pleas filed by Deputy Director of ED Kochi Zone, P Radhakrishnan.
The said FIR was quashed on the ground that one of the accused had already moved the Special PMLA Court alleging fabrication of evidence by ED officials.
The government said the single judge erred in losing sight of the fact that, in the facts and circumstances of the case at hand, there was every chance that the commission of offences mentioned in FlRs would never reach the Special Court during the course of teh trial of insofar as the same would gain the attention of the Court neither as part of the prosecution case nor the defence.
The petitions had challenged the two FIRs registered by the crime branch on based on a purported audio clip by gold smuggling accused Swapna Suresh, alleging she was coerced to implicate the CM.
Swapna Suresh is a former employee of the UAE consulate at Thiruvananthapuram and is the prime accused in the gold smuggling case where gold worth Rs 14.82 crore was smuggled in diplomatic baggage.
A similar charge was raised in a letter, reportedly written by co-accused Sandeep Nair.
Accordingly, the State preferred an appeal contending that the court should see through the smokescreen attempted to be created. It was asserted that the allegations were levelled against people in charge of the investigation of the case under PMLA and that such matters should be treated as a separate category.
The state is represented by senior government pleader V Manu.
“The learned single judge ought to have taken note of the fact that, in the said circumstances, it was the State Crime Branch which was best placed to verify and prove whether such falsification had taken place, through what means and for what purpose,” the Government said in its plea.
The single bench had ordered the Special PMLA Court, examining the money trail in the smuggling, to examine the evidence collected by police.
Quashing the FIRs, the court had held that one of the accused had already moved the Special PMLA Court, seeking remedy for his grievance that the ED officials were fabricating evidence.
The ED had alleged that one of the FIRs was registered against its unnamed officials with an “ulterior motive of derailing the statutory investigation” under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) into a large economic offence of smuggling of huge quantities of gold.
Also Read: Kerala HC directs State to fix Transportation Cost of Liquid Medical Oxygen