Former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa’s close aide V.K. Sasikala has approached the Madras High Court challenging refusal of an appellate tribunal for Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) cases in New Delhi to condone the delay of several years in preferring appeals against decisions rendered against her by an adjudicating authority under the Act.
A Division Bench of Justices M.M. Sundresh and C. Saravanan took up for admission a batch of four cases filed by her against the tribunal’s orders and directed Hema Babu, Special Public Prosecutor for the Director of Enforcement (ED) cases, to take notices on behalf of the prosecuting agency and file its counter affidavits within two weeks. The issue relates to a penalty of ₹18 crore levied by the adjudicating authority under FEMA in 2008 and 2009 in connection with import of transponders for a television channel named JJ TV. Since appeals against the levy of penalty were filed only in 2017, the tribunal on October 12, 2018, refused to condone the delay of around eight to nine years.
Statutory appeals
Referring to Section 19 of FEMA, which requires filing of statutory appeals within 45 days from the date of receipt of a copy of the adjudicating authority’s order, the tribunal said the appellant had not cited acceptable reasons for having chosen to file the appeals only in July 2017 as against the orders passed by the adjudicating authority in 2008 and 2009.
Though Ms. Sasikala stated that she was convicted and imprisoned at the Parappana Agrahara prison in Karnataka since February 2017 in connection with a disproportionate assets case and claimed to have come to know about the adjudicating authority’s orders only during her incarceration, the tribunal refused to accept such an explanation.
The tribunal pointed out that the adjudication orders were initially sent to Jayalalithaa’s Poes Garden residence in Chennai, where Ms. Sasikala was residing through registered post, but they got redirected to a residence in East Abhiramapuram and finally returned by the postal authorities to the ED with the endorsement ‘no such addressee.’
Hence, the orders were pasted on her last known addresses at East Abhiramapuram and T. Nagar and they were also served on the advocates representing her. However, senior counsel B. Kumar contended that the serving of orders on the advocates could not be termed as having been served on ‘authorised persons.’