The Supreme Court has held that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) should provide a person a written copy of the grounds of his or her arrest.
A Bench of Justices and A.S. Bopanna and Sanjay Kumar noted that Section 19(1) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) of 2002, which dealt with the procedure for arrest, had been ambiguous about this aspect, saying only that the ED need to “inform” the arrested person about the grounds of arrest.
The ambiguity had led to the ED following different procedures in different parts of the country. In some places, the ED officers shared a written copy of the grounds of arrest while in others they would orally read them out to the accused being placed under arrest.
