New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Monday refused to entertain a petition by British citizen Christian Michel, accused in the AgustaWestland case, raising a plea for right to life and right to liberty, to seek immediate release from jail. Michel said he has already spent 5 years 3 months in jail and the maximum if convicted is 5 years.
At the outset, a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice of India D Y Chandrachud and comprising justices J B Pardiwala and Manoj Misra told advocate Aljo K Joseph, representing Michel’s, that the court is not keen to entertain his plea seeking release from the jail.
Michel’s counsel said that a section in the extradition act makes it clear that his client cannot be charged under any other offences which were not there in the extradition application. “We cannot go ad nauseam…”, said the CJI, while declining to entertain Michel’s plea.
Michel, in his petition, said he has spent five years and three months in jail, while the maximum punishment in the case, if he is found guilty, is five years. He added that the investigation is not over and the trial has not even started, so his further judicial detention is "illegal".
The plea sought a direction declaring that the continuation of detention of the Petitioner in the Judicial Custody is illegal and violative of Article 21 of the Constitution of India. It also sought a direction that the petitioner shall be released since he has completed the maximum sentence which can be awarded to the petitioner under the law.
The plea cited Section 436A of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) which allows undertrials to be released on bail if they have undergone even half the sentence of the maximum punishment that they can be sentenced to if convicted before 2014 amendment, the maximum sentence for the offence he has been charged with is only 5 years.
Michel, the middleman in the AgustaWestland chopper scandal, was extradited from Dubai, after his arrest in 2017 in the UAE. The AgustaWestland case involves a 2007 contract signed by the government to buy 12 luxury helicopters for use by top leaders, including the President, Prime Minister, and former prime ministers. In 2014, the government scrapped the contract amid allegations that the supplier AgustaWestland, whose parent company was Finmeccanica, allegedly gave bribes in Italy and India.
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