Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) P S Ingle granted bail to Fadnavis on an ordinal bond of Rs 15,000. (File)

AFTER four exemptions from personal attendance, former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday finally appeared before the court in the poll affidavit case.

Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM) P S Ingle granted bail to Fadnavis on an ordinal bond of Rs 15,000.

Talking to mediapersons after coming out of the court, Fadnavis said, “I didn’t intentionally hide any case in my affidavit. It was my lawyer’s decision. And all cases against me had arisen out of my struggle for people and there’s is no personal case against me. The two cases in the instant petition have long been settled…”

The re-trial in the case, dating back to 2014, which stood truncated following the 2018 order of the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court giving relief to Fadnavis, was ordered by the Supreme Court after it quashed the High Court order on October 1, 2019. The petitioner in the original case, Satish Uke, a lawyer himself, had moved the Supreme Court. The trial resumed last year but Fadnavis kept asking for exemption from personal appearance for one reason or the other.