Ranchi:

Ex-Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren has been granted bail by the High Court. “Bail is granted. The court held, prima facie, Hemant Soren is not guilty, and there is no likelihood of the petitioner committing an offence on bail,” Mr Soren’s counsel Arunabh Chowdhury, told news agency PTI.

Given there are no other cases against him at this time, Mr Soren may be released soon.

Bail was reportedly granted on payment of two sureties of Rs 50,000 each.

The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha leader was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on January 31 on money laundering charges. The ED has accused him of running a scheme to manipulate records, via fictitious transactions and forged documents, and acquire 8.86 acres of land in Ranchi worth crores.

Mr Soren has repeatedly denied the charges against him, and has accused the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party of framing his arrest – which was weeks before the Lok Sabha election – to derail the opposition.

The bail order today comes after setbacks last month.

First, the Ranchi special court had denied Mr Soren bail.

That was followed by the High Court rejecting a plea to quash his arrest. The court pointed to an “abundance of documents that lay foundation for the arrest and remand of petitioner”.

Mr Soren was also told he could not “wiggle out of the mess he created for himself’. 

Following that the Supreme Court also refused interim bail; this was sought on grounds Mr Soren needed to campaign for his party, and the Congress-led INDIA opposition bloc, in the Lok Sabha polls.

READ | No Interim Bail Yet For Hemant Soren. He Cited Kejriwal’s Example

That setback meant Hemant Soren – unlike his Delhi counterpart Arvind Kejriwal, arrested by the ED in the alleged liquor policy scam but given interim bail by the top court – could not campaign.

, the Jharkhand leader was forced to withdraw an interim bail plea after tough questions over non-disclosure of facts; the focus was on Mr Soren not revealing the special court – which hears cases related to money laundering – had taken cognisance of the complaint against him.

READ | “Misused State Machinery”: ED On Soren’s Top Court Bail Plea

In that hearing the ED argued Mr Soren had tried to subvert the investigation by “misusing state machinery” and so opposed his “special prayer” for interim bail to campaign in the Lok Sabha polls.

There was also confusion over a prior bail plea – dismissed – in the High Court, which then pointed to an

NDTV Explains | Hemant Soren’s 2 Bail Pleas And A Rap By Supreme Court

This was after the Supreme Court issued a notice to the central agency and sought its response to an interim bail plea filed before it on grounds the High Court was delaying delivery of its judgement.

Mr Kejriwal had been granted bail by the top court to campaign for the AAP.

READ | 9 Acre Illegal Land, BMW Car: What Report On Soren’s Claims

Hemant Soren resigned as Chief Minister on January 31, hours after the ED began a marathon questioning session and then informed him he would be arrested.

READ | Soren Refused To Sign Arrest Memo Until He Resigned: Sources

Mr Soren, however, refused to accept the arrest memo till he had quit his post, in order to avoid being the first sitting Chief Minister to be arrested.

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New Delhi:

The Supreme Court on Friday disposed of the petition of former Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren seeking interim bail to campaign for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

The Supreme Court said that Mr Soren’s interim bail petition should be taken up along with the petition declaring his arrest in a money laundering case as “illegal”, due for hearing on Monday.

The Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader was arrested in January by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a money laundering case linked to an alleged land scam. He had moved the Supreme Court against the Jharkhand High Court order dismissing his application challenging his arrest by the ED and denied bail to him.

Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, who appeared for Mr Soren, told a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice D Y Chandrachud that polling for the ongoing Lok Sabha elections in Jharkhand will commence on May 13 and that the JMM leader should be allowed to campaign for his party.

“Hemant Soren was arrested on January 31. We moved the high court on February 4. The high court reserved the judgment on February 28 but did not deliver the judgment. The High Court kept the judgment pending for long,” Mr Sibal said.

“The first phase of election starts in the state on May 13 and so we moved this court under Article 32 of the Constitution, and notice was issued last week. After the notice was issued, the high court delivered the judgment rejecting his plea. Its very unfortunate that rights are being trampled in this fashion,” Mr Sibal had said.

Mr Soren was arrested on January 31 shortly after he resigned as the Jharkhand chief minister. He is currently lodged in judicial custody at the Birsa Munda Central Jail in Ranchi.

The central probe agency has alleged that “huge amounts of proceeds of crime” were generated by Mr Soren through manipulation of official records by showing dummy sellers and purchasers in the guise of forged/bogus documents to acquire huge parcels of land having value in crores of rupees.

New Delhi:

Invoices of a refrigerator and smart TV are among the evidence the Enforcement Directorate used to support its claim that Jharkhand’s ex-chief minister Hemant Soren acquired 8.86 acres of land worth more than Rs 31 crore illegally.

The federal probe agency obtained these receipts from two Ranchi-based dealers and attached those to its charge sheet filed against the 48-year-old Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) leader and four others last month.

The special PMLA court of Judge Rajiv Ranjan in Ranchi took cognisance of the prosecution complaint on April 4.

Mr Soren was arrested by the ED on January 31 in a money laundering case related to the alleged land grab, shortly after he resigned as chief minister. He is currently in judicial custody in Birsa Munda jail at Hotwar in Ranchi.

According to the ED, the two gadgets were purchased in the name of the family members of one Santosh Munda who told the agency that he has been “residing as a caretaker of the property of Hemant Soren on the said land (8.86 acres) for 14 to 15 years”.

The agency used Mr Munda’s statement to counter Mr Soren’s claim that he had no link with the said land. The ED also rejected the claim of a person named Rajkumar Pahan on the piece of land, alleging that he was a “front” for Soren to keep the asset under his control.

The ED claimed that soon after Mr Soren was issued the first summons in this case in August last year, Mr Pahan wrote to the deputy commissioner of Ranchi stating he and some others have the land in possession and the earlier mutation in the name of other owners be cancelled and they may be saved from being evicted from their property.

The state government “restored” the land to Mr Pahan on January 29, two days before Mr Soren’s arrest, so that the JMM leader’s control and possession remained “unimpeded,” the ED alleged.

According to the federal probe agency, the land was originally a ‘Bhuinhari’ property that cannot be transferred or sold to anyone under general situations and ‘Mundas’ and ‘Pahans’ were the owners of such land assets.

The immovable asset was later sold to some persons by the original allottees but Soren got them “evicted” and gained control of the land in 2010-11, the ED claimed.

Santosh Munda also told the ED that Hemant Soren and his wife Kalpana visited the land “two to three times” and that he worked as a labourer when a boundary wall was being erected at the plot.

The ED claims Mr Munda was entrusted the charge of the property’s caretaker at the behest of Mr Soren, apart from another accused in the case Hilariyas Kachhap who got an electricity meter installed there.

A refrigerator was purchased in February 2017 in the name of Mr Munda’s son while a smart TV was purchased in November 2022 in the name of his daughter at the address where the land is located in Ranchi, the agency said.

Thus, the ED said, it is “established” that Santosh Munda and his family were residing at this property and it was not in possession of the accused person Rajkumar Pahan.

“Rajkumar Pahan is acting as a frontman of Hemant Soren so that the property can somehow be shown to be in possession of Pahan and his family members and the evidence against Mr Soren can be frustrated and the proceeds of crime can be kept concealed,” the agency claimed.

The ED has listed these two bills as evidence and attached them with the charge sheet under the ‘relied upon documents’ category as it sought prosecution of Soren and others under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Mr Soren, Rajkumar Pahan, Hilariyas Kachhap, Bhanu Pratap Prasad and Binod Singh have been named as accused in the 191-page charge sheet. The piece of land — 12 adjacent plots guarded by a cemented wall — has also been attached by the ED on March 30 and it is valued at over Rs 31.07 crore.

The agency stumbled upon this case of alleged land grab while probing another money laundering case of 2022 where a 4.55-acre land of the defence ministry at Morabadi in Ranchi was “acquired fraudulently”.

According to the ED, the probe found that “a group of some private persons in connivance with government officials including the ex-DC Ranchi, Chhavi Ranjan, and Bhanu Pratap Prasad (sub-inspector of Jharkhand government revenue department) were part of a land-grabbing syndicate.” “They were involved in corrupt practices which included acquiring properties based on false deeds, falsification of government records, tampering with original revenue documents etc, to facilitate private persons to acquire landed properties fraudulently,” it said. 

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)