Mumbai: The Supreme Court on Thursday expressed sharp concerns over the Enforcement Directorate's practice of keeping accused persons as undertrials for years without securing convictions, effectively "sentencing them almost without a trial."
Chief Justice BR Gavai, heading a bench with Justices SC Sharma and K Vinod Chandran, questioned the ED's conviction rate during hearings on JSW Steel's rejected resolution plan for Bhushan Power and Steel Ltd. When Solicitor General Tushar Mehta highlighted the ED's recovery of ₹23,000 crores distributed among victims, CJI Gavai pointedly asked about actual conviction statistics reported Live Law.
"Even if they are not convicted, you have been successful in sentencing them almost without a trial for years together," the Chief Justice observed, highlighting the paradox where accused individuals face prolonged incarceration despite eventual acquittals.
Mehta defended the agency's operations, citing in stances where politicians' houses were raided and such massive cash amounts recovered that counting machines failed, requiring replacements. He also alleged that narratives against the ED were being built through media interviews and YouTube channels.
However, CJI Gavai firmly stated that judicial decisions aren't influenced by media narratives. "We do not decide matters on the basis of any narrative. I don't see the news on TV channels, sometimes in the morning I only read the headlines," he clarified.
The Solicitor General quoted Oscar Wilde's observation about newspapers: "If you do not read newspapers, you are uninformed; if you read newspapers, you are ill-informed - better not read."
This critique follows recent Supreme Court observations about the ED's poor conviction rate, with only 40 convictions from 5,000 PMLA cases over ten years, raising questions about the agency's investigative quality and prosecutorial effectiveness.
