Karti Chidambaram, son of senior Congress leader P Chidambaram, has been sent to the custody of the CBI for three more days by a court in Delhi. He will be presented in court on Monday. The CBI had sought his remand for six more days.
Karti has been in the custody of the CBI since his arrest on February 28.
He was arrested by the CBI last week on charges that he facilitated investment approvals for the INX media group back in 2007 and 2008, using the influence of his father, then Finance Minister P Chidambaram. In return, Karti is alleged to have been paid 700,000 dollars by the two former co-owners of the media house, Peter and Indrani Mukerjea.
Karti Chidambaram was arrested as soon as he returned from the UK at the Chennai airport. He has repeatedly said he was being framed by the agencies at the instance of the government.
Earlier in the day, the Delhi High Court had said that he cannot be arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in the INX Media money laundering case till March 20, the next hearing of the case.
The interim relief to the 46-year old businessman came a day after the Supreme Court transferred to the Delhi High Court his plea for cancelling summons issued by the Enforcement Directorate.
Karti’s lawyers had argued that the ED has no jurisdiction to conduct any investigation unrelated to the allegations in the FIR lodged by the Central Bureau of Investigation or CBI on May 15, 2017.
Salman Khurshid, Karti Chidambaram’s lawyer and former minister, had said they had asked the Supreme Court, and now the High Court, to cancel the summons by the ED because they anticipated “sequential arrests”.
“What we did in the Supreme Court was to anticipate sequential arrests, that when you get bail in one matter, then you are picked up in another matter… We wanted that to be clear… because the law doesn’t allow that to be done,” he had explained.