Supreme Court: 20 months in custody under PMLA outweighs Section 45's twin bail conditions

Sanjay Sureka was arrested on 18 December 2024 by the Enforcement Directorate in an ECIR linked to an earlier CBI case alleging that, during the insolvency of M/s Concast Steel and Power Limited, he orchestrated fraudulent transactions through 62 shell companies and 34 dummy directors to inflate the company's turnover, secure bank credit and divert funds, with proceeds of crime pegged at about Rs. 6,210.72 crore. He sought regular bail, arguing the arrest was vitiated because the material behind it reached the Adjudicating Authority five days late, contrary to Section 19(2) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, which the Calcutta High Court had rejected. The Supreme Court held that Section 19(2)'s requirement to forward material "immediately" means expeditiously and simultaneously with the arrest, not within a fixed deadline, so a five-day delay caused by the sheer volume of records did not taint the arrest.

It nevertheless granted bail: with three prosecution complaints running to roughly 15,000 pages, 97 co-accused and about 98 witnesses, the trial could not realistically conclude soon, and the appellant had already spent 20 months in custody against a maximum sentence of seven years under the Act. Citing Manish Sisodia v. Directorate of Enforcement, the Court held that Section 45's stringent twin conditions for bail cannot be allowed to override the constitutional guarantee under Article 21 once incarceration becomes prolonged, and released him on bail with conditions including surrender of his passport.