Srinagar: The High Court of J&K and Ladakh on Wednesday granted bail to a Tamil Nadu resident accused of duping an army officer of Rs one crore by “posing” as a prominent businessman, financer and co-producer of the super-duper hit film ‘Baahubali’, besides boasting of high-level connections in Parliament and Rashtrapati Bhavan.
Justice Sanjaj Dhar while allowing bail plea of the 35-year-old, Nagraj Vm allegedly involved in financial scams in Tamil Nadu besides “grabbing” crores of rupees from film producers, directors and medical students and others, said “…in the absence of any statutory bar to grant of bail in economic offence of the present nature, declining bail to the petitioner on the said ground would not be legally permissible.”
The bench also recorded “in the face of ….legal position, it is clear that mere pendency of multiple FIRs against an accused cannot by itself be a ground to deny bail in a case where the maximum punishment for the offence for which the accused is charged extends up to seven or ten years, particularly when the charge-sheet stands produced against him and he has spent more than one-and-half years in jail as an under-trial”,
It held that denying the concession of bail to Nagraj may not be a proper exercise of discretion vested with the court under Section 483 of BNSS as the same would militate against the principle that bail is the rule and jail is the exception.
The court, accordingly, granted bail to the accused with certain riders.
According to the army officer, who as per his complaint was duped by Nagraj, he came into contact with the accused in August 2023 and by posing himself as a big businessman, financer, co-producer of Bahubali (movie), and expressed his desire to invest in Kashmir.
He also asked the army officer that if he was interested in buying a house in Delhi, he could get him the same at reasonable rates. On September 8, 2023, Nagraj requested him to transfer Rs 12 lakhs in his (accused) father’s account as he was going to the President’s house.
The complainant officer transferred Rs 11 lakhs from his account and Rs 1 lakh from his wife’s account. In September, 2023, Nagraj called the complainant to Delhi for discussing the property matter and the complainant went to his house in Defence Colony, New Delhi.
Nagraj showed the property papers of a house to him and claimed that he and his father were its owners, and they wanted to sell it. As the complainant was looking for a property, he agreed to buy and asked him to prepare a written agreement.
Nagrai, the army officer said, told the complainant that he would send the same by post as the documents were lying in Chennai, but he never did so.
In October 2023, Nagraj called the complainant to Chennai, where he showed some apartment, where renovation work was going on, saying that it was his production house.
The complainant at the request of Nagraj deposited Rs 32 lakhs in the account of K. Vishnu Sagar, Nagraj’s father, Rs 30 lakhs in the account of Ranjeet Surya Ganesan (Nagraj’s Chennai friend) and Rs 44 lakhs in his own account.
Rupees 1.06 crores was paid by the complainant (army officer) through his own and wife’s account.
When the suspicion arose in the mind of the officer, he enquired and came to know that the property did not belong to Nagraj, and he had shown him false papers pertaining to the property.
When the complainant asked Nagraj to return his money, he kept on delaying and finally issued cheques for an amount of Rs 1 crore and due to insufficient funds, the cheques were bounced, reads the complaint.
