NEW DELHI: Two months after it conducted searches on the premises of a railway claims tribunal judge in Patna, R K Mittal, and his associates in a case of Rs 50 crore fraudulent withdrawal of death compensations, ED on Friday attached 24 properties belonging to the accused.
This was not the first time the agency had acted against a judge accused of alleged bribery or association with fraudsters engaged in fixing benches and cultivating judges for favourable judgments. Apart from the known instances, the agency is also learned to be keeping a close surveillance on conflicts of interest of judges and alleged efforts to bribe them.
On Aug 10 in 2023, ED arrested Panchkula’s former special court judge Sudhir Parmar in connection with alleged bribery and for favouring accused in a money laundering case against real estate developer IREO and its promoter Lalit Goyal.
Goyal was arrested by the agency just a month before it took Parmar into custody. Panchkula’s special CBI court judge was suspended by Punjab and Haryana high court in April that year after agencies produced “incriminating evidence” against him for allegedly favouring the IREO promoters accused in a money laundering investigation.
ED later arrested Goyal’s associates and promoters of M3M, Basant Bansal and Pankaj Bansal, in a separate case. ED in its remand note had claimed that “Sudhir Parmar (the Panchkula judge) was showing favouritism to the accused Roop Bansal, his brother Basant Bansal, the owners of M3M, and Lalit Goyal, the owner of IREO Group, in lieu of undue advantages”.
In yet another case, while probing the Chhattisgarh PDS scam pertaining to the period of the previous Congress-led govt of Bhupesh Baghel, ED came across evidence of alleged liaisoning between two senior IAS officers who were accused in the case and a judge of the Chhattisgarh high court influencing the trial.
ED brought the issue to the notice of Supreme Court, which transferred the judge in question to Patna high court, an action similar to what the SC collegium had proposed in case of a judge of Delhi high court after alleged recovery of a huge pile of cash from his residence.
In the case of Chhattisgarh HC judge, as reported by TOI, ED had told SC that two IAS officers, Anil Tuteja and Alok Shukla, “were in touch with the high court judge who granted bail to Shukla”. The agency further alleged that the then advocate general of the state had been liaising between the two accused and the judge, indirectly alleging quid pro quo in relief granted to the babus under investigation in the PDS scam.
