After a 22-year-long trial, a Mumbai court Wednesday cleared a 76-year-old man of charges of violating foreign exchange regulations in 1997.
The trial in the case filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) began in 2002, with the agency claiming that two men, Pravin Popatlal Shah and Jayantibhai Parmar, were receiving payments from two people in London, and were distributing it in Indian currency to evade foreign exchange laws.
While Shah passed away pending trial, the court observed that the evidence from the witnesses examined are mostly against him and not against Parmar, and cleared the latter of the charges.
According to the ED, the money belonged to Indians living outside the country who sent the money into the country without paying foreign exchange rates in violation of Reserve Bank of India rules.
The agency had claimed that in 1997 a search was conducted at the residence of Shah in Girgaon and Rs 17.50 lakh were seized. The agency claimed that the probe showed that Shah was working on the instructions of the two persons in London and would receive Rs 300 per lakh he managed to distribute here.
Parmar was alleged to be working on a fixed salary of Rs 2,000 to assist Shah. The ED alleged that money to the tune of Rs 27 crore was distributed by Shah between September to December 1997. The men were booked under relevant sections of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, 1973 and the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999.
Pending trial, however, Shah passed away. The prosecution examined two witnesses against Parmar, both enforcement officers. Parmar’s lawyers, however, submitted to the court that they did not appear before the court for cross-examination and hence the accused did not get an opportunity for a fair trial.
“There is no any other independent evidence to corroborate the statement of present accused. The statement of accused no.1(Shah) is not useful as he is no more. The evidence of the witnesses which are examined is mostly against accused no.1 and not against present accused no.2 (Parmar),” the additional chief judicial magistrate said in the order passed Wednesday.
