SC Judgment: ED Can’t Arrest Anyone For Not Responding To Questions

New Delhi: In a significant judgment, the Supreme Court has said that Enforcement Directorate (ED) can’t arrest anyone under Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for failing to respond to the agency’s questions, or for non-cooperation in response to summons.

A bench of Justices AS Bopanna and Sanjay Kumar delivered the judgment on Tuesday but it was released today.

“It is not open to ED to expect an admission of guilt from the person summoned for interrogation and assert that anything short of such admission would be an ‘evasive reply’… Mere non-cooperation of a witness in response to the summons issued under Section 50 of the 2002 Act would not be enough to render him/her liable to be arrested under Section 19,” Justices Bopanna and Kumar declared.

Asserting that an interrogation can’t be equated with a confession, the two-judge bench said the failure of a person to respond to questions posed by ED won’t be sufficient in itself for the investigating officer to opine that they were liable to be arrested under PMLA Section 19. The section specifically requires an officer to find reasons to believe that an accused was guilty of an offence under PMLA before making an arrest, the judges pointed out.

“The court has a duty to verify and ensure that the conditions in Section 19 (of PMLA) are duly satisfied and that the arrest is valid and lawful. In the event, the court fails to discharge this duty in right earnest and with the proper perspective, the order of remand would have to fail on that ground and the same cannot, by any stretch of imagination, validate an unlawful arrest made under Section 19,” the bench said.

The judgment quashed the arrest of real estate firm M3M directors Pankaj and Basant Bansal, Hindustan Times reported on Wednesday.