ED review: bench first, answers later
The Supreme Court will list review pleas against its 2022 PMLA verdict. For now, it’s about which bench hears them — not the merits. Telangana has watched the BJP-led Centre use the ED freely; a real review would finally test that playbook.
The Supreme Court is set to decide the bench before it hears the review.
The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to list a batch of review petitions against its July 2022 ruling in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary, which had upheld key PMLA powers used by the Enforcement Directorate. The court said the immediate step is to record parties’ consent on bench allocation, not to begin arguments on the merits. According to a report of the hearing, Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana were identified for the bench, with the next date to be notified later.
Senior advocate Kapil Sibal, for review petitioner Karti P. Chidambaram, pressed that notices issued in August 2022 mean the matters should now be heard. The Centre argued the review must be confined to two issues flagged when notice was first issued: whether an accused must receive a copy of the ECIR, and the reverse burden of proof under Section 24. Petitioners have proposed 13 questions; the court will decide what, if anything, is open in review.
The 2022 judgment — the one that called ED officials “not police officers as such” and said ECIRs need not be supplied in every case if grounds of arrest are disclosed — remains the law while the court sorts out who hears the challenge. Telangana has lived with what the BJP-led Centre built with that verdict; what gets listed next will show whether that edifice finally faces a proper stress test.