The Madras high court on Thursday concluded the hearing on the batch of petitions filed by the Tamil Nadu government and its liquor distribution arm, TASMAC, against the Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) raid, and search and seizure operations at the TASMAC headquarters in Chennai last month.
A bench of justices SM Subramaniam and K Rajasekar reserved orders on the petitions after hearing exhaustive arguments from all sides for over three days. The bench, however, directed the matter to be listed again on Monday “despite orders being reserved” to enable senior counsel Vikas Singh, appearing for the government, to give a short response to ED’s arguments.
Additional solicitor general SV Raju, who was representing ED, told the court that ED had followed due process throughout the search and seizure operations at TASMAC between March 6 and 8 this year.
Raju refuted allegations that some senior employees of TASMAC, including its managing director, and another senior women official were harassed by ED during such search.
The ASG also reiterated that ED had reasonable grounds to believe that the offence of money laundering had been committed by TASMAC officials and that the proceeds of crime or their records were stored at the Chennai headquarters.
“The allegation of harassment is an afterthought. It was only created (by TASMAC) so they have a ground to file this writ petition,” Raju said.
The central agency had earlier argued that the TASMAC employees crying foul over ED seizing their mobile phones and other personal digital device and claiming breach of privacy, had no right to do so. It said that privacy rights cannot be absolute when they come into conflict with the state’s legitimate interest in investigating crimes, particularly under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
Both the Tamil Nadu government and TASMAC have maintained that ED’s actions were politically motivated and meant to tarnish the state’s image ahead of the assembly polls in the state scheduled for next year.
They have urged the Court to hold ED’s search and seizure conducted last month as illegal.
Earlier, the high court had asked ED why it had raided the TASMAC headquarters in Chennai when the 41 FIRs, claimed to be the basis for its investigation into the alleged scam, were registered across Tamil Nadu for several individual offences of bribery, liquor price inflation among others.
ASG Raju had told the court that ED had exercised its statutory power granted under section 17 of the PMLA that allows the agency to search a premise on mere “suspicion.”