Former Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren made an oral mentioning before the Supreme Court on Monday to urgently hear his appeal against his arrest on money laundering charges.
Appearing before a Bench headed by the Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, for Mr. Soren, said polling in Jharkhand for the Lok Sabha election was due on May 13, and that he should be allowed to campaign for his party.
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“The High Court kept the judgment pending for long. The judgment in my case against my arrest was reserved by the High Court in February. Finally, we had to appeal to the Supreme Court with a petition for interim bail, saying the High Court was not pronouncing its verdict,” Mr. Sibal explained.
Mr. Sibal said the rights of Mr. Soren were being trampled upon.
Chief Justice Chandrachud informed Mr. Sibal that the plea for interim bail was already coming up for hearing on May 7. Mr. Sibal said his appeal against the High Court judgment should also be listed along with the bail plea.
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The bail plea had come up earlier on April 29 before a Bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Datta. The Bench had issued notice to the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) while giving the Jharkhand High Court liberty to pronounce its judgment on Mr. Soren’s petition challenging his arrest.
The High Court’s judgment, on May 3, refused to quash the case against Mr. Soren, while observing that the former Chief Minister could not wriggle out of the “mess” by invoking the spectre of political vendetta.
Mr. Soren was arrested on January 31 after he resigned as the Chief Minister, and party loyalist and State Transport Minister Champai Soren was named as his successor.
He was arrested after being grilled by the ED for seven hours in the case.
The ED is probing the alleged “huge amounts of proceeds of crime generated by manipulation of official records by showing dummy sellers and purchasers in the guise of forged/bogus documents to acquire huge parcels of land having value in crores’‘.
