New Delhi: The Delhi High Court will Wednesday hear the anticipatory bail plea moved by Congress MP Karti P Chidambaram in connection with a money laundering case registered by the Enforcement Directorate linked to an alleged Chinese visa scam.
The matter, which was listed before the vacation bench of Justice Poonam Bamba, could not be heard Monday due to the non-availability of the Additional Solicitor General during the hearing time.
Accordingly, it was listed for Wednesday following requests by the counsels.
Karti, the son of senior Congress leader and former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, knocked the doors of the high court following the dismissal of his anticipatory bail plea by a lower court.
Last week, the court of special CBI judge MK Nagpal had denied the anticipatory bail applications moved by Karti and other accused persons in the case, including the Congress MP’s chartered accountant, S. Bhaskar Raman, and Vikas Makharia, the associate vice-president of thermal power plant Talwandi Sabo Power.
In the last hearing, senior advocate Kapil Sibal had argued that the alleged transaction was from 2011 and the ED registered the case after the lapse of a long time, pointing out that there was no investigation in all these years.
The counsel also argued that the value of the alleged transaction was Rs 50 lakh, which was less than Rs 1 crore, and in view of this fact he should be granted bail.
According to the FIR, the Mansa-based Talwandi Sabo Power Ltd took the help of a middleman and allegedly paid Rs 50 lakh to get visas issued for Chinese nationals to complete a project before deadline.
“The payment of the said bribe was routed from the Mansa-based private company to a private person in Chennai and his close associate through a Mumbai-based company as payment of false invoice raised for consultancy and out of pocket expenses for Chinese visa related works,” the FIR read.