Gayatri Prajapati
Credit: PTI File Photo
Lucknow: The Allahabad High Court on Tuesday granted bail to former Uttar Pradesh minister Gayatri Prajapati in a money laundering case registered by the Enforcement Directorate in January 2021.
Justice Subhash Vidyarthi of the Lucknow bench granted relief to Prajapati but he will have to remain in jail due to other cases.
The high court observed that Prajapati, who has been in jail in this case since February 8, 2021, has already spent a period behind bars which is more than half of the sentence for the offence under the PML Act for which he has been charged, and hence he was entitled to bail.
The bench also considered that the probe in the case on the basis of which the PMLA case was lodged is still not complete and if it results in a clean chit to him, the entire exercise being conducted by the trial court in recording evidence in the PMLA case would become futile.
The Enforcement Directorate registered the case against Prajapati on January 14, 2021, after a case of allegedly having assets disproportionate to known sources of income was registered against him.
According to the ED counsel, out of eight, six witnesses have been examined before the trial court, which is about to conclude the hearing.
Prajapati, who was a mining minister in the previous Samajwadi Party government, was in November 2021 sentenced to life imprisonment in a gangrape case. He was arrested in the case in February 2017.
The former minister had recently sought bail in the gangrape case while his appeal against the conviction by a special court was pending, but the high court had on Friday refused to grant him relief.