Retired IAF Junior Warrant Officer, Associate Get 3 Years in Cocaine-Linked PMLA Case

A special court in Mohali has convicted an 80-year-old retired Indian Air Force official and his 77-year-old associate in a money-laundering case linked to a 2008 cocaine seizure, sentencing both to three years of rigorous imprisonment under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Special Judge Hardip Singh delivered the verdict on September 3 and also imposed a fine of Rs 5,000 each on the two convicts. The court ordered that the period of detention already undergone by them would be adjusted against the substantive sentence. Both men had spent about 13 years facing proceedings in the case while remaining on bail in the related police matter.

The convicts are Dara Singh, who served in the Indian Air Force for 29 years and retired as a Junior Warrant Officer, and his associate Gurdarshan Singh. The case has drawn attention not only because of the age of the accused but also because it extends legal consequences from a narcotics seizure more than a decade and a half old into a separate prosecution under the anti-money laundering law.

The origin of the case goes back to August 2008, when SAS Nagar (Mohali) police booked the two men after recovering 1.23 kilograms of cocaine, then valued at about Rs 50 lakh. Along with the contraband, police seized two bank cheques with a combined value of Rs 10 lakh. According to the prosecution version, Dara Singh had handed over those cheques to Gurdarshan Singh “to purchase the said contraband.”

The police case led to a trial under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act, and both men were convicted in March 2015. Local reports of that judgment said each of them was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment. Dara Singh later challenged that conviction before the Punjab and Haryana High Court. His sentence was suspended, and the appeal is still pending. The PMLA proceedings decided this week are separate from that appeal, even though both cases arise from the same seizure.

In the money-laundering prosecution, the Enforcement Directorate registered a case in October 2019 and filed its chargesheet in October 2022. The agency treated the seized cocaine and the two cheques as proceeds of crime, arguing that the property involved in the transaction fell within the scope of the PMLA.

The defence, however, contended that the recovered contraband and cheques could not be treated as proceeds of crime because there was “no drug money involved in the scheduled offence” and because it had not been established that any amount was “exchanged or earned” by the accused in that transaction. The Enforcement Directorate opposed that argument and submitted that “property” under the PMLA includes any property used in the commission of a scheduled offence.

The special court accepted the prosecution’s position and rejected the defence theory. It held that the cheques were the result of dealings between the two accused and therefore amounted to proceeds of crime. In its order, the court said:

“These cheques being the outcome of the dealings between both the accused in that case are to be considered as proceeds of crime and the arguments of learned defence counsels are liable to be discarded.”

The court further recorded that both accused had committed an offence defined under Section 3 of the PMLA and punishable under Section 4, and it convicted them under Section 4 of the Act.

During the hearing on sentencing, both men sought leniency from the court. They told the judge that they were the sole breadwinners of their respective families, that they suffered from various ailments, and that they were innocent because the original police case had been falsely registered against them. The court did not accept those pleas and awarded the statutory punishment of three years’ rigorous imprisonment along with the fine.

The latest judgment does not affect the pending High Court challenge in the NDPS case, but it does create a separate conviction under the PMLA arising from the same 2008 seizure. In legal terms, the two proceedings address different offences: the earlier case concerned narcotics possession and related charges, while the money-laundering case dealt with the use or handling of proceeds linked to that scheduled offence.