‘Avoidable haste’: HC on pre-arrest bail to industrialist by single bench in drug racket case

When the two orders were passed last year, some senior advocates had raised their concern with the then Chief Justice, Sanjay Kishan Kaul, who had made changes in the judges’ roster by withdrawing the bail matters from Justice Jeyapaul.

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Terming the orders of granting interim and final pre-arrest bail to Chahal as an “erroneous exercise of discretionary power” by the high court, the division bench said it “unhesitatingly renders” the order “fallible within the limited jurisdictional scope of Section 439(2) of CrPC” and “thus bail orders deserve and are ordered to be cancelled”.

Chahal and his brother Jagjit Singh Chahal have one pharmaceutical industry each at Baddi and Barotiwala — M/s Montek Biopharma and MBP Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd.

They are charged with misappropriating two controlled substances, ephedrine and pseudoephedrine, supplied to them at concessional rates for illicit manufacturing and illegal trade of synthetic drugs to racketeers at much inflated price.

The prosecution had alleged that the Chahal brothers amassed assets worth more than Rs 72 crore without known sources of income and the Enforcement Directorate had seized their properties after finding that these were acquired from the “proceeds of crime”.

The division bench observed: “There was avoidable haste in entertaining the pre-arrest bail petition of Paramjit Singh Chahal for want of full and correct facts due to which he succeeded in surrendering in the High Court and got interim bail to escape custodial interrogation.”

Chahal had got pre-arrest bail from the high court when he had been evading arrest for almost five months. The division bench added that the bail orders passed by Justice M Jeyapaul have hampered the investigation and deprived the investigating agency from reaching a better conclusion.

The court said the bail orders have taken into consideration “the irrelevant materials, the veracity and truthfulness whereof is yet to be adjudged by the special court.” The court also added, “It (order) has overlooked the relevant materials like nature of allegations and the huge quantity of ICE of ‘commercial quantity’.”

The court said the quantity of Methamphetamine (ICE) allegedly recovered from the premises or vehicles of Chahal brothers is much more than its “commercial quantity”.

The gravity of these allegations were to be seen in view of the fact that ‘pseudoephedrine’ and ‘ephedrine’ are the major ‘precursors’ for manufacturing Methamphetamine (ICE) – a synthetic drug.