Delhi HC stays trial court order granting bail to Arvind Kejriwal till decision on ED’s plea challenging bail.

The vacation bench of Justice Sudhir Kumar Jain said it would take two-three days to pronounce the order on ED’s stay application. The Delhi high court on Friday stayed a trial court order granting bail to chief minister Arvind Kejriwal till the pronouncement of its order on Enforcement Directorate (ED) plea seeking stay on the bail order. The vacation bench of Justice Sudhir Kumar Jain said it would take two-three days to pronounce the order on ED’s stay application. “In the meantime the petitioner and the respondent shall be at the liberty to file written submissions latest by Monday,” court noted in the order. The court also issued notice in ED’s stay application and its plea challenging trial court’s order granting bail to the Aam Aadmi Party convenor. During the hearing, ED’s counsel SV Raju called the trial court’s decision as ‘lopsided’ and ‘one-sided’. “Matter has been decided without considering the documents. Without considering the documents, how can you come to the finding that they are relevant or irrelevant. Without perusing the documents, you say that they are “irrelevant.” Even this is perverse,” the additional solicitor general had argued. On the other hand, Kejriwal’s counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi countered ED’s charges in the high court. “The ED’s approach that the trial court should’ve heard the probe agency ‘endlessly’ and would written an essay while writing the order is deplorable, sad, it can come from a private body. It should never come from a government authority but for long statutory objectivity of statutory body is lost as far as ED is concerned,” Singhvi argued. “ED like “Alice in Wonderland” has its own meaning of perversity. For them it means error is perversity and unless every argument of ED is repeated verbatim, it is perversity,” Kejriwal’s lawyer said. He alleged an attempt by ED to circumvent the law by their own meaning of perversity. “Liberty of individual is very very low if at all it exists in the mind of ED. This is inverting the law & turning the law in its head. The ED is taking advantage of “typographical errors” in the trial court order,” Singhvi said in court.