Supreme Court rejects Sasikala's plea for review in DA case
As Jayalalithaa had died on December 5, 2016, the bench said the appeal insofar she was concerned had come to an end.
New Delhi: In a huge setback to AIADMK general secretary V.K. Sasikala, the Supreme Court on Wednesday dismissed her plea for a review of the February 14 order sentencing her to four years’ imprisonment in the Rs 66-crore disproportionate assets case involving former chief minister J. Jayalalithaa.
A bench of Justices S.A. Bobde and Amitav Roy also rejected the review petitions of V.N. Sudhakaran and Ms Ilavarasi, who were sentenced to four-year jail terms in this case for abetment. All the three are undergoing the sentence in a Bengaluru jail.
The bench, in a brief order passed in chambers, said: “We have perused the review petitions and written submissions and propositions handed over to us by senior counsel Mukul Rohatgi for the petitioners. We do not find any error in the common judgment dated February 14, 2017, much less an apparent error on the face of the record as to call for its review. The review petitions are accordingly dismissed. The application for hearing the review petitions in open court is rejected.”
On February 14, a bench of Justices Pinaki Chandra Ghose and Amitav Roy had convicted them by reversing the Karnataka high court’s orderacquitting them in the DA case. As Jayalalithaa had died on December 5, 2016, the bench said the appeal insofar she was concerned had come to an end.
Initially, the review petitions were listed before Justices Amitav Roy and Rohinton F. Nariman, who had recused from the case as his father Fali S. Nariman had appeared for Ms Jayalalithaa in the bail matter.
Seeking a review of this verdict, Ms Sasikala and the two others said as they were not government servants, the provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act did not apply to them and that they were wrongly convicted even after the death of Jayalalithaa (A1). They argued that once the main accused had died, the charges against them would not survive independently.
They had not amassed wealth as held in the judgment as they were independent income-tax assesses and had paid income-tax during the relevant period. They asked the court to have a relook at the verdict after a fresh hearing in open court and to set them at liberty.
The court had held V.K. Sasikala and others had hatched one criminal conspiracy after another at Poes Garden to launder Jayalalithaa’s ill-gotten wealth to purchase huge properties in the names of “masked fronts”. It said that Jayalalithaa did not accommodate Sasikala at Poes Garden out of some “philanthropic urge” but with cold-blooded calculation to keep herself secure from any legal complications, that may arise from criminal activities.
Coming down heavily on Ms Sasikala and the other two, the bench said the fact that A2 to A4 did combine to constitute the firms to acquire huge tracts of land out of the funds provided by Jayalalithaa was also a clear index that their assemblage in the house of Jayalalithaa was not engendered by any philanthropic urge for friends. They were residing with A1 (Jayalalithaa) without any blood relation between them to frame and further the criminal conspiracy to hold the assets of Jayalalithaa.