Sunil Kedar, a Congress leader and former minister of Maharashtra, asked the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court on Thursday to stay his sentence in a case from 2002 that involved financial irregularities at Nagpur District Central Cooperative (NDCC) Bank. The court turned down his request.
The bench said, “Just because the accused has to go to work for his constituents doesn’t mean that there should be an exception to the conviction.”
“An object of legislatures in keeping convicts from running for office should be looked at when such applications are decided,” Justice Urmila Joshi-Phalke’s single-judge bench said.
Lawyers say that Kedar won’t be able to run in the future Maharashtra Assembly elections in October and November because of the HC’s decision unless the Supreme Court rules in his favour.
Section 8(3) of the Representation of People (RP) Act, 1951 says that “a person convicted of any offence and sentenced to imprisonment for not less than two years shall be disqualified from the date of such conviction and shall continue to be disqualified for a further period of six years after his or her release.”
The Nagpur assistant chief judicial judge found Kedar guilty under the Indian Penal Code and gave him a sentence of five years in prison with hard labour and a fine of Rs 12,000,000 on December 22, 2017. Kedar was kicked out of the state assembly as an MLA the day after he was found guilty. The High Court put the sentence on hold in January of this year, and Kedar was given bail.
According to the prosecution, Kedar and two other people worked together to steal Rs 117.51 crore from the NDCC Bank. They did this by saying that the bank had invested the money in government securities through private dealers. It was said that the dealers then stole money from the NDCC Bank by not buying government securities for the bank.
The Sessions Court turned down his request for a stay on the conviction on December 30, 2018, which he then took to the High Court to question.
Kedar’s lawyer, senior advocate S. K. Mishra, said that the session judge had made a “mechanical order” without looking at the facts of the case. He argued that the prosecution would not be hurt if the current application were granted because the accused’s sentence had already been put on hold by this court (HC) in January 2024.
Mishra also said that Kedar would “lose his right to represent the people” if the conviction against him was not stayed.
But Special Public Prosecutor Siddharth Dave, who was representing the police, was against the plea. He said that the reasons for suspending the sentence and staying the verdict were different, and Kedar didn’t make a good case in this plea.
The HC said that Kedar was involved in crimes involving money that belonged to the government. Justice Joshi-Phalke turned down Kedar’s request by citing previous Supreme Court decisions about Section 8(3) of the Representation of People Act. He said, “Just because an accused is convicted, falling under Section 8(3), and he wants to contest an election, that by itself is not sufficient to stay the conviction mechanically.”
It was in 2002, when Kedar was head of the Nagpur District Central Cooperative Bank, that the bank scam he was found guilty of began. The bank lost more than 125 crore in two years while he was in charge. He was kicked out of the bank along with other owners, and the operations were taken over by an administrator.
