Satyendar Jain was arrested on May 30 last year. (File photo)
The Delhi High Court on Thursday denied bail to jailed former AAP minister Satyendar Jain in a money laundering case being probed by the Enforcement Directorate.
The high court, while dismissing the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader's bail plea, said he is an influential person and may tamper with evidence. The high court also said there was no illegally or infirmity in last year's trial court order denying bail to the AAP leader.
Satyendar Jain, who was arrested on May 30 last year, is accused of having laundered money through four companies allegedly linked to him. He had approached the high court after the trial court dismissed the bail petition in November last year.
"The present court cannot go into validity of these proceedings. Facts show that certain disproportionate assets were masked. The court has to see the prima facie case. The broad probabilities indicate that the companies associated to him are controlled and managed by him (Satyendar Jain)," it said.
The detailed order is awaited.
Satyendar Jain had earlier submitted that he had cooperated with the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the investigation. The former Delhi minister also stated that the trial court Judge and ED has gravely misread and misapplied the PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) by identifying proceeds of crime solely on the basis of accommodations entries. That accommodation entries cannot itself lead to a punishable offence under PMLA, he had said in his plea to the high court.
The enforcement agency has alleged that the companies which were "beneficially owned and controlled" by Satyendar Jain, who was a minister at the time of the alleged offence, laundered ₹ 4.81 crore from the shell companies to Kolkata-based entry operators through a hawala route.
The agency had argued that there was sufficient evidence to prove that Satyendar Jain "in the thick of things". "Money laundering is crystal clear. Their case is that Satyendar Jain has nothing to do with it. I have to establish that Satyendar Jain was in the thick of these things," the agency's counsel had argued before the high court.
Satyendar Jain was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in the money laundering case based on a FIR registered against him by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in 2017. The CBI complaint states that Satyendar Jain had acquired movable properties in the name of various persons from February 14, 2015, to May 31, 2017, which he could not satisfactorily account for.