Chinese visa case: Court rejects bail plea of Karti Chidambaram

New Delhi: A special CBI court here on Friday turned down the anticipatory bail applications of Congress MP Karti Chidambaram, and others in a money laundering case registered by the Enforcement Directorate, linked to an alleged Chinese visa scam.

Apart from the Congress leader, the Rouse Avenue Court in Delhi also dismissed the anticipatory bail applications moved by other accused persons in the case including his chartered accountant S Bhaskar Raman and Vikas Makharia, the associate Vice President of thermal power plant Talwandi Sabo Power.

On May 30, the court of Special CBI judge M.K. Nagpal had reserved the order and posted the matter for Friday.

In the last hearing, senior advocate Kapil Sibal argued that the alleged transaction is from 2011 and the ED registered the case after a lapse of a long time.

He pointed out that there was no investigation all these years. Counsel also argued that the value of the alleged transaction is Rs 50 lakh, which is less than one crore and in view of this fact, he should be granted bail.

According to the FIR, the Mansa (Punjab)-based private Talwandi Sabo Power Ltd took the help of a middleman and allegedly paid Rs 50 lakh to get the visa issued for Chinese nationals to complete a project before the deadline.

"The payment of said bribe was routed from the Mansa-based private company to said private person of Chennai and his close associate through a Mumbai-based company as payment of false invoice raised for consultancy and out of pocket expenses for Chinese visas related works, whereas the private company based at Mumbai was never in any kind of work relating to visas rather it was in an entirely different business of industrial knives," as per the case.

Karti Chidambaram, son of former Union Minister P. Chidambaram and the Lok Sabha member from Sivaganga, denied all the allegations and said that he "did not facilitate a single Chinese national" and the case was bogus.