In a significant development, a sessions court on Thursday framed charges in a money laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) against incarcerated former DMK minister V Senthil Balaji.

Principal sessions judge S Alli, before whom the former minister was produced in person, read out the charges in both Tamil and English and asked whether he would plead guilty.

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The judge had framed the charges dismissing the petition by Balaji, seeking to defer it in view of his bail petition pending before the Supreme Court. The apex court had posed the question whether trial in the PMLA case could proceed without trial of the predicate offence, the cash-for-job scam pending against him.

Denying the charges, the former minister said he had not committed any offence and was innocent and that the case was foisted on him due to political vendetta. There is no evidence for the charges levelled against him by the ED, he submitted and expressed his desire to cross-examine the witnesses.

Following this, the judge posted further hearing in the case to August 16 for examination of witnesses and extended the judicial custody of Balaji, who was arrested on June 14 last year. This is the 54th time that his custody has been extended, prolonging his incarceration.

Considered a DMK strongman of Western Tamil Nadu, Balaji was arrested by the ED in the cash-for-job scam during the then AIADMK government of Jayalalithaa in which he was the Transport minister in 2011. After Jayalalithaa’s demise, he was briefly with the faction led by TTV Dhinakaran, nephew of VK Sasikala. But he switched over to the DMK ahead of the 2021 Assembly election which he had won and was inducted as the Electricity Minister.

It was during his tenure as the Transport Minister under Jayalalithaa that he alleged to have manipulated the marks of candidates appearing for various examinations in the Transport Department in a cash-for-job scam. Three FIRs were filed against him, his brother, Ashok Kumar and his Personal Assistant Shanmugam. Even as the cases were pending before the special court for MPs/MLAs in Chennai, Senthil Balaji and others moved the High Court seeking to quash the FIRs on the ground that a settlement had been reached with the complainants. A total of 81 persons were victims of the scam and of this the cases of 13 candidates who had applied for Junior Engineers had been investigated. It was at this juncture that the ED made its entry and filed a case under PMLA.