The Supreme Court on Tuesday granted bail to Basant Bansal and Pankaj Bansal, who are directors of the Gurugram-based real estate group M3M, in a money laundering case.
A bench of Justice A.S. Bopanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar, which had reserved the verdict on September 11 after hearing submissions from lawyers, granted the relief to the directors of the realty firm.
The Bansals had appealed to the Supreme Court against the July 20 order of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, which had rejected their bail pleas, citing the serious nature of the case.
Basant and Pankaj Bansal had previously been arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with a money laundering investigation related to an alleged bribery case.
On August 11, the Supreme Court had sought responses from the Centre and the Enforcement Directorate regarding the bail plea of the accused directors. This came after the high court refused to release them on bail in connection with the ED’s probe into an alleged bribery case involving a former judge.
The money laundering case for which Basant Bansal and Pankaj Bansal were arrested is related to an FIR filed by the anti-corruption bureau of the Haryana Police in April. The FIR was filed against Sudhir Parmar, a former special judge for ED and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) cases who was posted in Panchkula, his nephew, and a third director from the M3M group, Roop Kumar Bansal.
According to the FIR, the ED alleged that reliable information had been received that Parmar was allegedly showing “favoritism” to the accused Roop Kumar Bansal, his brother Basant Bansal, and real estate firm IREO owner Lalit Goyal in the ED and CBI cases pending against them in his court. Following the registration of the ACB case, Parmar was suspended by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
The ED has stated that it has collected “incriminating evidence such as bank statements and a money trail, etc.” regarding the allegations in the FIR before making the arrests.