The Enforcement Directorate on Thursday arrested suspended Panchkula special court judge Sudhir Parmar as part of a money laundering investigation against him linked to charges of alleged bribery, official sources said.
The former judge was taken into custody under the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) from Gurugram, near Delhi. He is expected to be produced before a court on Friday and the ED will seek his custodial remand, they said.
The agency had earlier arrested Parmar's nephew Ajay Parmar, two promoters of of real estate company M3M -- Basant Bansal and Pankaj Bansal -- and Lalit Goyal, owner and MD of another realty group IREO, in this case.
The money laundering case stems from an FIR filed by the Haryana Police's Anti-Corruption Bureau in April against Sudhir Parmar, the former special CBI and ED judge posted in the special PMLA court in Panchkula, his nephew Ajay Parmar, and Roop Kumar Bansal, the third promoter of the M3M group.
According to the ACB FIR, the ED had said, reliable information was received that Sudhir Parmar was showing "favouritism" to the accused, namely Roop Kumar Bansal, his brother Basant Bansal and IREO's Lalit Goyal in the criminal cases of the ED and other cases of the CBI pending against them in his court.
The ED said in a statement that the ACB FIR stated that "as per reliable information, instances of grave misconduct, abuse of official position and demand and acceptance of undue advantage/bribe from the accused persons in the cases pending in his court were observed (in the judge case)".
Sudhir Parmar was suspended by the Punjab and Haryana High Court after the registration of the ACB case.
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