In a significant victory for the ruling DMK days ahead of the counting of votes in this assembly election, the Madras High Court on Tuesday quashed a money laundering case registered by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against senior DMK minister I Periyasamy.
It is a big setback for the Central agency and a big relief for the DMK veteran from the case pertaining to allotment of prime housing plots in Chennai and the allottees included retired IPS officer MS Jaffer Sait and his wife M Pravin, among others during the then Karunanidhi government. Now, Periyasamy is Minister for Rural Development in the Stalin government.
The First Bench comprising Chief Justice SA Dharmadhikari and Justice G Arul Murugan, quashed the Enforcement Case Report (ECIR) booked by the Enforcement Directorate in 2020 on the basis of the irregular housing plot allotment case. Observing that a case related to the predicate offence had already been quashed by the High Court, the Bench quashed the PMLA case against the minister dragging for more than two decades. Earlier, the High Court as well as the Supreme Court had quashed the case against seven accused,
The judges concurred with the defence counsel who argued that since the High Court had already quashed the case booked by the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption (DVAC), there was no question of the existence of any proceeds of crime based on which the ED could no longer pursue the money laundering probe,
Initially, the DVAC had registered an FIR against Periyasamy in 2011, on the return of the AIADMK to power on that charge of allotting plots of the Tamil Nadu Housing Board in Thiruvanmiyur under the Government’s discretionary quota when he was Minister for Housing in the late Karunanidhi ministry during 2007-2011. He was charged with allotting plots to Jaffar Sait and his wife and another individual for extraneous reasons. The DVAC alleged that Jaffar Sait’s wife, Parvin, and the other beneficiary, R Durgashankar, had obtained the plots by claiming to be social workers and had later entered into an agreement with a realtor for developing the prime property, receiving a few crores of rupees.