The special PMLA court in Kochi allowed the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) to provide its voluminous chargesheet to the 55 accused in Karuvannur bank scam case as digital documents.
The order issued by Special judge Shibu Thomas on Friday can be considered as a landmark one. It may be noted that the Supreme Court has not yet taken a decision on whether a voluminous charge sheet can be given to the accused in electronic format.
The ED on November 10 moved the special court trying the Karuvannur Service Cooperative Bank scam case to allow it to furnish soft copies of the complaint and the copies of the documents to the 55 accused in the case.
It will be practically impossible to furnish the hard copies of documents and the complaint, which runs into 26,000 pages to the accused. It would cost Rs 12 lakh and require 13 lakh sheets of paper to provide them the hard copies, the ED submitted before the court.
The probe agency has submitted 55 sets of final complaints and related documents in pen drives to the court to be supplied to the accused.
The accused has the l right to get copies of documents to be relied upon by the prosecution during the hearing.
However, it has not been insisted in any of the laws that hard copies of documents shall be supplied to the accused. The documents are supplied to the accused to give adequate notice to them on the material to be used against them so that they will not be prejudiced during trial, the counsel for the ED contended.
Every accused may not require every copy of the documents produced by the prosecution. If the court directs to serve the hard copy of each document to each of the accused, it will require more than 13 lakh sheets of paper.
It would go light on the environment if the accused individually take the copies of documents required for them to defend the case, and save hundreds of trees from being axed for producing paper, the ED’s counsel further argued.