Supreme Court

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday said that disproportionate assets per se is not a crime unless it is proved that source of such wealth was illegal.

“Disproportionate assets per se is not a crime. If some of the income cannot be proved, then the offence is complete. Otherwise, it will only be an inference,” a bench of Justices PC Ghose and Amitava Roy said.

The top court’s observation came while hearing an appeal by the Karnataka government challenging the acquittal of Tamil Nadhu CM Jayalalithaa, her close aide N Sasikala Natrajan and her two relatives VN Sudhakaran and Elavarasi by the Karnataka High Court in May 2015.

The High Court had set aside the trial court order convicting Jayalalithaa and acquitted of all charges in the disproportionate assets case. The AIADMK chief and others were accused of allegedly amassing disproportionate asserts to the tune of Rs 66.65 crores during her first term as CM from 1991 to 1996.

This was the first hearing in the matter after Jayalalithaa was voted back to power in the state last month.

Describing the defence offered by Jayalalithaa and three others as ‘cock and bull story’, the vacation bench was told that accepting the arguments by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister would amount to throwing the anti-corruption law - Prevention of Corruption Act - into the dustbin.

As arguments by Karnataka government were concluded, the court said that one of the three options it may exercise would be either to uphold the High Court verdict acquitting Jayalalithaa and three others, reverse the High Court verdict and restore the conviction or still after re-appreciating the entire evidence, direct fresh trial or remit for the matter to the High Court for fresh consideration.

The bench outlined the three options available to it after senior counsel Dushyant Dave appearing for Karnataka described the judgment acquitting Jayalalithaa and others as ‘perverse beyond imagination’, devoid of reasoning and based on ‘conjectures and surmises’. He told the court it had the three options available to it but could not re-appreciate the evidence to find faults with the trial court judgment of conviction.

Telling the court that the burden of proof of the legitimacy of the sources of the income was on the accused, Dave said merely that the income tax department had accepted their returns does not attach legitimacy to their incomes and assets. He said that the income tax department was only concerned with realising the tax and production of returns was not the end of the matter.

He said that the burden is on the accused to show the lawful source of the money and on the basis of which property have been purchased.

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