Excise case: ED summons CM Arvind Kejriwal hours after SC quashes Manish Sisodia’s bail plea

NEW DELHI: Hours after the Supreme Court docket turned down the bail petition of his former deputy and shut confidant Manish Sisodia, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Monday summoned Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal to seem earlier than it on November 2 in reference to the continued probe into the liquor rip-off.
This follows the ED’s submission to the SC earlier this month that it supposed to examine AAPas a beneficiary of the bribes, the “proceeds of crime” in ED’s parlance, from the liquor rip-off.The ED had made the submission in response to a query by the courtroom as to why it had not made AAP an accused within the case regardless of alleging that the bribes earned from allegedly favouring a cartel of liquor sellers had been used to fund the Kejriwal-led occasion’s election marketing campaign in Goa.

However the grounds for Kejriwal’s questioning gave the impression to be getting readied quickly after the company grilled his private assistant Bibhav Kumar and Jasmine Shah, one other shut aide who headed the Delhi Dialogue Fee, in February, across the identical time Sisodia was taken into custody. Vijay Nair, AAP’s communications chief who was among the many first to be arrested in reference to the liquor rip-off, can also be recognized to be very near the Delhi CM.
The ED introduced on report Kejriwal’s involvement within the excise coverage rip-off in a number of chargesheets filed by it.
Kumar was questioned on the listing of people that had spoken to the CM in reference to the scrapped excise coverage of 2021-22. The ED has termed Nair, who resided in a ministerial bungalow subsequent to the CM’s residence, one of many key protagonists of the rip-off and was allegedly instrumental in producing Rs 100 crore prematurely kickbacks from the South Group, a cartel of liquor sellers from Andhra Pradesh and Telangana who, after the adjustments carried out by the Kejriwal authorities, ended up controlling the liquor enterprise within the nationwide capital.

In one other chargesheet, the ED had quoted from the recorded statements of C Arvind, a DANICS officer and secretary to Sisodia, concerning the alleged conspiracy and energetic connivance of the CM and different members of his authorities within the liquor rip-off. Arvind had instructed the company that he was known as to Kejriwal’s residence by his boss Sisodia the place he was handed over the ‘draft GoM’ report which was allegedly designed to profit a gaggle of wholesalers by elevating their fee from 5% within the outdated regime to 12% in return for bribes.
Watch Enforcement Directorate summons Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal in cash laundering case