Khushi
Petitioner in the multi-crore Maharashtra State Co-operative Bank (MSCB) case filed a plea before the Principal Judge seeking to transfer the case to another court as the applicant apprehends the biased nature of the present court.
The applicant Manikrao Jadhav is one of the few petitioners who sought to oppose the closure report filed by the Economic Offences Wing (EOW) before the Special Court.
The original complainant of the scam is Surinder Arora, whose PIL caused the Bombay HC in 2019 to order an FIR into the scam.
“The applicant has real apprehension and genuine fear that free and fair hearings would not be available to him before the judge,” the plea said.
The petitioner also narrated an instance of 20 April when the court “suspiciously” took final written arguments on record on behalf of Arora that were filed by two unknown persons.
This was strongly objected by the Advocate Satish Talekar who represents Arora and other protest petitioners in the same case.
The plea also referred to the instance where the court had refused Surinder Arora for additional time to go through voluminous documents that ran into over 74,000 pages though he had tested positive for COVID-19 and was hospitalized.
The court had apparently said that he seems to have recovered and there was no need to give additional time as the hearing will be through video-conference.
“The applicant fails to understand how and why the Judge is so hostile for granting additional time to the applicants to go through papers of the investigation which is not a mechanical exercise. The 74,784 papers are not merely photographs or paintings and cannot be looked into or dissected in a day or two,” the plea said.
