The Supreme Court has rejected the bail application of Mahrashtra minorities minister Nawab Malik, wh was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in February in an alleged money laundering case involving property purchases related to Dawood Ibrahim, the mastermind of the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts.
The Supreme Court said: “It is too nascent a stage to interfere with the investigation. We can't interfere with the due process at this stage. You (should) move the competent court,”
Yesterday on Thursday, the Enforcement Directorate had filed a 5,000-page charge-sheet with a Mumbai court for hearing PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) cases. It alleges that Malik had funded members of Dawood Ibrahim’s circle (known as the ‘D-gang’) in acquiring property illegally.
The land and properties that have been attached by the agency in relation to the probe include Goawalla compound, a commercial complex, and three flats in Mumbai’s Kurla west, two flats in Bandra west, and 147 acres of agricultural land in Osmanabad district of the state.
The ruling alliance of the Shiv Sena, NCP, and the Congress have termed his arrest as a “politics of vendetta”. Other ministers of the Maharashtra government such as Sanjay Raut and Anil Deshmukh also have investigations launched against them by the CBI and the ED. Malik had become prominent during the ‘Aryan Khan Drugs Case’ saga when he publicly questioned and criticized the so-called drug bust and NCB officer Sameer Wankhede, and related it to a larger ‘ploy’ of the Centre to rein in Maharashtra and its thriving film industry in Mumbai.
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