IANS/Bengaluru
A special bench of the Karnataka High Court will from January 5 take up the corruption case against former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa and her three aides on a daily basis.
Though the case came up for hearing yesterday before Justice H Billappa, Jayalalithaa’s counsel sought its postponement to Monday, as justice C R Kumaraswamy, who has been appointed to hear it, was on leave till today.
Chief justice D H Waghela on Thursday set up the single judge bench, as directed by the Supreme Court on December 18 to hear the appeals of Jayalalithaa and her three associates to expeditiously decide their plea within three months.
The other three are V K Sasikala, V N Sudhakaran and J Ilavarasi.
The apex court had on December 18 also extended the three month bail period of Jayalalithaa by another four months in the Rs666.5mn disproportionate assets case, in which a Central Bureau of Investigation special court had on September 27 sentenced her to four years simple imprisonment along with Rs1bn fine.
The three co-accused were also sentenced to four years simple imprisonment but with a fine of Rs100mn each.
Complying with the apex court’s October 17 order, Jayalalithaa’s counsel submitted to the high court on December 8 all relevant documents, running into a whopping 215,000 pages in 686 volumes.
The apex court had on October 17 also granted bail to Jayalalithaa and the others on their appeal against the high court’s October 7 verdict, which refused to release them on bail from the Bengaluru central jail during the pendency of their appeals.
The criminal appeals seek to quash the special court’s orders, which convicted and sentenced all the four accused, not to collect the penalty amount, return the confiscated property and grant them bail till the case was disposed of by the higher courts.
