The judicial custody of former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh, who was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the ₹100-crore extortion case, is set to end on Monday, December 27.
Anil Deshmukh’s custody was extended earlier this month, hours after suspended police officer Sachin Waze told the state-appointed inquiry commission the former home minister had neither made any monetary demands nor was any money collected from Mumbai’s bar owners or people related to them.
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Deshmukh was arrested by the ED on November 2 in connection with the ₹100-crore extortion allegation and the related money laundering case, after the agency interrogated the former minister for 13 hours.
The allegations were first raised by former Mumbai Police commissioner Param Bir Singh, who claimed that Deshmukh had asked the then assistant inspector Sachin Waze to collect ₹100 crore every month from hotels and bars in the city.
For now, the former Maharashtra home minister remains lodged at the Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai.
Meanwhile, a Delhi court last week directed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the role of Anil Deshmukh in the alleged leak of the agency’s preliminary enquiry (PE) purportedly giving a clean chit to him.
The claimed PE findings, which were leaked, showed the deputy superintendent of police probing the matter had purportedly opined that no cognisable offence was made out against Deshmukh.
It was later converted into a first information report (FIR) based on a contrasting opinion of the deputy SP. The opinion mentioned in the FIR said that cognisable offence was made out against Deshmukh.
The CBI started a probe into the leak in which it emerged that findings of the PE were influenced. The inquiry was initiated on the orders of the Bombay high court, which issued the direction while hearing a public interest litigation on allegations of corruption against Deshmukh.
