On 12 July 2024, a two-judge bench granted Arvind Kejriwal interim bail in the ED's Delhi excise-policy matter, held that an arrest under Section 19 PMLA must rest on cogent, fairly weighed material and is judicially reviewable, and referred framed questions on whether the 'need and necessity to arrest' is a distinct ground of challenge to a larger bench.
On 18 September 2020, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court upheld a decree of partial specific performance where a vendor had promised the same land twice over. A digest of Section 12 of the Specific Relief Act read purposively, the post-2018 shift from discretion to obligation, and why a subsequent purchaser with notice of an earlier contract cannot invoke Section 19(b).
On 3 October 2023, the Supreme Court held that the Directorate of Enforcement must furnish the written grounds of arrest to a person arrested under Section 19 of the PMLA as a matter of course and without exception. Merely reading the grounds out, or letting the arrestee read and sign them, does not satisfy Article 22(1) or Section 19(1) — and an arrest made without written grounds, together with the remand that follows, is vitiated. The judgment also censured the ED's clandestine second ECIR, recorded to defeat the anticipatory-bail protection the appellants had just secured, and set aside the contrary High Court view in Moin Akhtar Qureshi. This is the PMLA origin of the written-grounds rule that Prabir Purkayastha later carried across to the UAPA and arrests generally.
On 15 December 2023, a coordinate bench of the Supreme Court read Section 19 of the PMLA to require that the written grounds of arrest be furnished within 24 hours of arrest rather than at the instant of arrest, and held that Pankaj Bansal operates prospectively — so arrests made before 3 October 2023 are not vitiated for want of contemporaneous written grounds. The essential qualifier that narrows the Pankaj Bansal safeguard.
On 7 August 2023, the Supreme Court held that 'custody' under Section 167(2) CrPC covers agencies beyond the police — including the ED — that the 15-day custody ceiling runs across the whole 60/90-day investigation, and that a writ of habeas corpus cannot short-circuit a magistrate's remand once Section 19 PMLA is complied with. A digest of the cash-for-jobs custody ruling, the hospitalisation episode, and the reference on Anupam Kulkarni.
On 27 July 2022, a three-judge bench led by Justice A.M. Khanwilkar upheld substantially all the contested provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 — the arrest power under Section 19, the provisional attachment power under Section 5, the search-and-seizure architecture under Section 17, the reverse-burden provision under Section 24, and the twin bail conditions under Section 45. The judgment also held that an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR) is not equivalent to an FIR and need not be supplied to the accused. A digest of the holdings, the doctrinal contributions, and the review now pending.