New Delhi: A Delhi court on Tuesday, May 31, summoned Congress leader D. K. Shivakumar and others in a money laundering case lodged against him in 2018 after taking cognisance of the charge sheet.
The original complaint in the case had been lodged before a special court in Bengaluru by the Income Tax department in 2018, which had alleged that the Congress leader was involved in tax evasion and ‘hawala’ transactions worth crores of rupees.
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed a charge sheet in the case last week through its special public prosecutor, Nitesh Rana, on the basis of which the Special Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Delhi issued summons to Shivakumar.
Notably, the ED had arrested Shivakumar, the Congress’s Karnataka unit head, on September 3, 2019 for charges of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Thereafter, he was granted bail on October 23 that year.
The ED has alleged that Shivakumar garnered inordinate amounts of wealth between 2014 and 2018, when he served as the Karnataka power minister, and as such, the contracts he granted during this period are being looked into by the agency.
This also prompted the agency to review contracts Shivakumar granted while he was the minister of urban development in the Karnataka government, between 1999 and 2004, the Hindu reported.
Following his 2019 arrest by the ED, the agency had written a letter to the Karnataka government saying that it had discovered that Shivakumar had violated the PMLA. Accordingly, the state government gave sanction to the CBI to probe the Congress leader.
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In 2020, the CBI went on to register a first information report (FIR) in the case in which it alleged that Shivakumar’s family had gained assets worth Rs 73.93 crores between 2013 and 2018.
However, a Special court in Bengaluru discharged Shivakumar in three tax evasion complaints filed by the IT department. Moreover, in 2021, the Karnataka high court upheld the Special court’s decisions.