Allahabad High Court penalizes Amrapali Director for misusing process of Court

Allahabad High Court penalizes Amrapali Director for misusing process of Court

The Allahabad High Court recently imposed penalty of Rs. 50,000 on Amrapali Group's Director, Ajay Kumar for his attempts to subvert and misuse the process of the Court instead of surrendering before the Court as ordered earlier.

A modification application was filed by the applicant seeking to modify the order dated 18th September, 2020 by which the High Court had rejected his interim bail granted earlier.

The applicant (Ajay Kumar) is involved in the Rs 6,000 crores Amrapali mega scam and a case proceeding under Section 3 and 4 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002 was pending against him and others co-accused in the Court of Special Judge/ Session Judge Lucknow.

In addition to this, another order passed in the matter on 3rd December, 2020, Kumar was expected to surrender immediately before the trial court after the two months/ sixty-day period was over i.e., on or before December 31, 2020.

Following the instant modification application, the High Court pointed that the whole effort of the accused-applicant was to avoid a particular Bench and get the matter listed before the Bench which passed the order in September, by cleverly drafting the application without annexing the final order dated 3rdDecember, 2020.

"Order dated 3rd December, 2020 has not been annexed. However, order dated 18th September, 2020 is annexed with the application. This was deliberately done to avoid the listing of the bail application before the Bench which has passed the final order dated 3rd December, 2020", the Bench stated.

The High Court further pointed that, "The first time when the matter got listed before this Bench on 12th January, 2021, an effort was made to get the matter delisted and an office report was engineered from a dealing clerk to the effect that the matter was wrongly listed before this Bench".

"Considering the aforesaid, this Court is of the view that the accused/applicant instead of surrendering before the Court on or before 31st December, 2020, has tried to subvert and misuse the process of the Court and has filed a nonmaintainable application before this Court."

Since the accused-applicant had tried to subvert and misuse the process of the Court and interfered with the course of justice, the Court opined that it would be appropriate to impose a cost of Rs.50,000/- to be deposited by the applicant with Oudh Bar Association within a period of two weeks from the date of order i.e., 13th January, 2021

With these observations, the Court found the application to be non-maintainable and was thus rejected the same with costs.