A special CBI court granted bail to Santosh Jagtap who was arrested in the corruption and bribery case against former Maharashtra home minister Anil Deshmukh, but refused to judge the validity of the tapping of his phone by the then state intelligence commissioner Rashmi Shukla, done allegedly for unearthing the purported transfers and postings scam.
CBI had arrested Jagtap from his residence on October 31, 2021 following Rashmi Shukla’s report of August 26, 2020, named Jagtap as one of the middlemen who helped secure cream postings for senior police officials by bribing two political heavy weights including Anil Deshmukh. The transfer and postings case is a strand of the main case of extortion, registered against the former minister and senior Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader.
It was also revealed that Jagtap’s phone was tapped to gather information on the alleged transfers and postings racket. His advocate Jatin Shah alleged the phone tapping by the State Intelligence Department was illegal citing it as a ground for grant of bail among other arguments. He also claimed absence of any material before court suggesting Jagtap had played any role in the alleged scam.
Shah said the tapping was illegal and violative of Jagtap’s right to privacy and cited a March 2021 report by Sitaram Kunte, the then Maharashtra chief secretary, to claim that the surveillance was not authorised and therefore needed to be kept out of consideration by the court.
The CBI opposed his bail application saying the case was at an important stage of investigation.
The special court, however, refused to enter into the controversy over phone tapping.
“In my view, this court, while deciding the application for bail cannot venture to determine whether the order of the State Intelligence Department, Government of Maharashtra was ultra vires of Section 5(2) of the Indian Telegraph Act, 1885 and violated the fundamental rights of the applicant,” special judge D P Shingade said, steering clear of the matter while granting bail to Jagtap.
The court ordered the 45-year-old businessman to be released on bail on furnishing a personal bond of ₹50,000 and one or two sureties in the same amount.
CBI registered the case on April 21 after former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh accused Deshmukh, who was then the home minister of Maharashtra, of instructing Mumbai police officers, including dismissed officer Sachin Vaze to collect ₹100 crore from various bars in Mumbai as extortion money.