The Bombay High Court in India has decided to grant Simpy Bharadwaj bail after she was arrested in a Bitcoin fraud case worth ₹6,606 crore ($785 million). Bharadwaj was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in 2023 for her alleged role in the scam linked to Delhi-based Variable Tech Pvt Ltd.
The court, presided over by Justice Manish Pitale, reportedly considered Bharadwaj’s status as a woman and a mother of a six-year-old child as grounds for granting bail. While the full order is not yet publicly available, the reasoning behind this decision has raised questions about the role of gender in bail applications.
Critics argue that granting bail solely based on gender creates an uneven playing field. They point out that the severity of the alleged crime and the strength of the evidence presented should be the primary factors in determining bail, not the accused’s gender or parental status.
Bharadwaj was arrested last December 17, 2023, under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for her alleged involvement in a scheme run by a company called Variable Tech Pvt Ltd.
This scheme promised people a guaranteed 10% return on their Bitcoin investments over 18 months, but many people lost their money. The judge, Justice Manish Pitale, pointed out that Bharadwaj has been in jail for almost ten months, and keeping her there would not help since the trial was not starting soon.
The court also acknowledged that she is a mother who needs to provide care and support for her child and should benefit from the proviso to Section 45(1) of the PMLA, which allows for special consideration in cases involving women.
According to the judge, “This Court finds no reason as to why the applicant is to be denied the benefit of the exception carved out in the proviso for special treatment,”
The judge also pointed out that the grounds for her arrest were drafted hastily, lacking credible evidence to justify the charges against her.
Moreover, Bharadwaj’s name was not originally in the reports that led to the ED’s case against Variable Tech, which primarily implicated her husband, Amit Bharadwaj, and others who were directly involved in the fraudulent scheme.
The ED’s Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) was filed in April 2018, but Bharadwaj’s name only surfaced in subsequent FIRs in December 2019 and February 2022 when she was accused of obstructing the search they were conducting.
In the ruling, the court granted her bail with a guarantee of ₹50,000 but clarified that its comments were only for the bail application and should not affect the trial court’s future decisions.
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