Court junks Enforcement Directorate's plea for custody of duo in IPL betting case

AHMEDABAD: A special court for Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) cases rejected an Enforcement Directorate's plea here today, seeking ten days' custody of two alleged Delhi-based bookies in a multi-crore rupee IPL betting case.

Special PMLA court Judge A P Bhojak rejected ED's plea stating that it had failed to produce ample grounds for seeking custody of the alleged bookies.

The court observed that ED had already processed various documents in connection with the case and hence there is no need to seek custody of those accused.

On May 10, ED had arrested the two persons namely Ritesh Bansal, alias `Bharat Delhi', and his brother Ankush Bansal from their house in Shastri Nagar in Delhi.

They were arrested during ED's searches with regard to an alleged Rs 4,000-crore money-laundering case against syndicates which accepted bets on IPL T-20 cricket matches.

Yesterday, ED had produced the duo before the court and also moved a remand plea stating that they are associated with Tommy Patel and Kiran Mala, two Gujarat-based bookies who were arrested in March.

Patel and Mala allegedly placed bets through the United Kingdom-based betting website Betfair, ED plea said.

ED's plea before the court said that Ritesh and Ankush operated from a house in Palam Vihar in Gurgaon, Haryana, adding that it had seized eight laptops, a CPU, 57 cellphones and Rs 26,30,000 in cash from the house.

Arguing the case, the ED prosecutor demanded the duo's custody for ten days to seek details about several documents recovered from them.

On behalf of ED, Advocate Sudheer Gupta told the special PMLA court that the prosecution agency had recovered various documents from the duo which suggested that they had links outside the country.