Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Monday granted bail to former Maharashtra home minister and Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) leader Anil Deshmukh in a corruption case lodged by the CBI.
Deshmukh, however, will not be released from the jail soon as the central probe agency has sought time to challenge the decision in the Supreme Court in the coming days.
A single-judge bench of Justice Makarand S Karnik had on December 8 reserved the order on Anil Deshmukh’s plea challenging a special CBI court’s order that denied him bail.
He is currently in judicial custody and lodged at the Arthur Road prison in Mumbai.
Deshmukh, 74, had approached the high court after a special CBI court rejected his bail plea last month. He sought bail both on medical grounds as well as on merits.
The case had been registered against him by the probe agency in April 2021. He has been charged with asking police officers in Mumbai to extort Rs 100 crores from bar owners each month.
In October, Deshmukh was granted bail by the Bombay High Court in the money-laundering case filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
He was arrested in a money laundering case by the ED in November last year.
He was arrested by the ED and subsequently by the CBI on allegations that it was on his instructions, when he was state Home Minister in the MVA government, that bribes were collected by dismissed cop Sachin Waze from bar owners.
The ED claimed that Deshmukh abused his authority as the state’s home minister by using some police officials to collect Rs 4.70 crore from several Mumbai bars.
