Cal HC adjourns hearing of petitions on ED raids at I-PAC sites till Jan 14 due to courtroom chaos

Kolkata: The Calcutta High Court on Friday adjourned the scheduled hearing of cases related to the Enforcement Directorate's search and seizure operations at political consultancy firm I-PAC's office on account of unmanageable chaos inside the courtroom.

Justice Suvra Ghosh, in whose court the matter was scheduled to be heard, adjourned the hearing till January 14, and left her chair after repeated requests to those not connected with the petitions to leave the courtroom fell on deaf ears.

A subsequent official request from the agency before the high court’s Acting Chief Justice Sujoy Paul, praying for an early hearing on Friday itself, was not entertained.

The Acting Chief Justice deemed it prudent to not interfere with the judicial order passed by Justice Ghosh.

The court was scheduled to hear petitions by the ED and the Trinamool Congress in connection with the dramatic developments on Thursday, after Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee landed up at the agency's operation venues, and alleged that investigators were trying to seize TMC's sensitive data ahead of the upcoming high-stakes assembly polls.

While the TMC in its writ petition sought judicial intervention to restrain the ED from "prejudice, misuse and dissemination" of seized data during the search operations, the agency moved the bench alleging interference in its investigation, and prayed for transferring the probe into Thursday's developments to the CBI.

The ED has made Banerjee a respondent in its petition, along with some officers of the state.

The TMC petition has been filed against the Union of India.