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New Delhi: On Monday, Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi Chief Minister, skipped the Enforcement Directorate’s 7th summons for questioning in the excise policy-linked money laundering case. His party, AAP, said the matter was “pending in court” and said it would be heard on March 16.
It urged the Enforcement Directorate to wait for the court’s decision instead of summoning repeated summonses. Earlier, the ED sent a seventh summons to Kejriwal on February 22 after the Delhi CM did not appear before the probe agency on the sixth summons for questioning in a money laundering case.
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) once again termed the ED summons as illegal, saying the matter of the validity of ED summons is now in court and the ED itself went to court. The party also said the Narendra Modi-led Centre should not “create pressure like this”, adding that it will not leave the Opposition INDIA bloc.
The Delhi Chief Minister has skipped all the Enforcement Directorate’s summonses, calling them “illegal”. A Delhi court last week had asked Kejriwal to appear before it on February 17 acting on a complaint filed by the ED for disobeying ED summons in this case and noted that prima facie the AAP chief was “legally bound” to comply.
This was the 7th summons in this case by the ED to the former Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer. Apart from the seventh summons, the earlier six were issued on February 14, February 2, January 18, January 3, December 22, 2023 and November 2, 2023.
According to the probe agencies, the Delhi government’s excise policy for 2021-22 to grant licences to liquor traders allowed cartelisation and favoured certain dealers who had allegedly paid bribes for it, a charge repeatedly refuted by the AAP. The Enforcement Directorate wants to record Kejriwal’s statement in the Delhi excise policy 2021-22 case on issues like the formulation of policy, meetings held before it was finalised, and allegations of bribery.
The policy was scrapped after Delhi LG V K Saxena in July, 2022, recommended a CBI probe into alleged irregularities and lapses in its implementation. The probe agency claims that the AAP used kickbacks worth Rs 45 crore generated via the policy as part of its assembly poll campaign in Goa in 2022. After the CBI, the ED also registered a case under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) in the matter.
