A Delhi court has discharged Nitin Bhatnagar, a close aide of Congress leader Kamal Nath’s nephew Ratul Puri, in a money-laundering case, ANI reported on Sunday.
The court said in its order on August 17 that there was no reason to suspect that the accused man may have committed the offence for which a supplementary chargesheet was filed against him.
The Enforcement Directorate had arrested Bhatnagar, a former relationship manager of the Bank of Singapore, under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act in 2023.
The money laundering case is based on a 2019 first information report by the Central Bureau of Investigation, which alleged that compact disc manufacturer Moser Baer India Limited and its promoters defrauded the loan taken from the Central Bank of India to the tune of Rs 354.51 crore.
The Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate had booked Ratul Puri, his father Deepak Puri, mother Nita in the case in 2019.
On August 17, Special Judge Sanjeev Aggarwal said that the prosecution has failed to make out a preliminary case for the framing of charges against the accused man.
“If there is no suspicion, then why should the accused go through the rigours of trial all the way,” the court said.
The Enforcement Directorate accused Bhatnagar of helping Puri open a bank account in the name of a company that received proceeds of crime. It alleged that Bhatnagar was involved in the “layering of the proceeds of crime” for Puri.
However, the court on August 17 said that there was no way for Bhatnagar to know that the money he was dealing with as a relationship manager had been siphoned off from Moser Baer by defrauding the Canara Bank and others banking entities.
“How could the accused who was only working as a relationship manager in Bank of Singapore have worked out that such funds were part of the dirty money,” the judge asked.
The court also observed that while the transactions took place in 2012-13, a first information report was only registered in 2019.
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