A special court designated under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) has rejected the bail applications of travel firm Cox and Kings’s promoter Ajit Peter Kerkar and its Chief Financial Officer Anil Khandelwal in a money laundering case concerning Yes Bank.
This is the first bail application of Kerkar to be rejected. In December last year, another bail plea by Khandelwal was rejected along with that of his co-accused and colleague Naresh Jain, an internal auditor of the travel group. A co-accused in the case, Rana Kapoor, the former MD and CEO of Yes Bank has been granted bail by the court last month.
On 23 April, the court rejected the interim bail plea of Kerkar that had been filed on the grounds that he has co-morbidities and keeping his present plea for orders after the hearing of the plea of Khandelwal will cause prejudice to him. His advocate had stated that both their cases were on different versions with respect to the wrongdoing. Additional Sessions Judge Abhijeet A. Nandgaonkar had said in his order that already Kerkar’s bail plea is reserved for orders and granting his temporary bail has no merit.
According to the agency’s case, the travel group had availed loans to the tune of Rs 3642 crores from Yes Bank using manipulated finance statements and balance sheets and then diverted the loan amount and siphoned it. The sanctioning of the loans was driven by Yes Bank founder and then MD and CEO Rana Kapoor by defying norms, it claimed.
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