A court in Kashmir has directed the framing of charges against National Conference president Farooq Abdullah and other accused in the alleged Jammu and Kashmir Cricket Association (JKCA) scam while dismissing an application by the Enforcement Directorate to add additional charges in the case.
Chief Judicial Magistrate of Srinagar, Tabasum, in the order on March 2 said that this court finds that the essential ingredients of the offence under sections 120B (criminal conspiracy), 406 (criminal breach of trust) and 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant) of the Ranbir Penal Code are made out against all the accused persons.
The court said the accused including Abdullah will be charged for the commission of the said offences.
The court listed the case for March 12 for framing of charges.
The CJM Court also dismissed an application filed by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) seeking to add additional offences in the case.
The ED had requested the court to include Sections 411 and 414/424 of the law as additional charges in the case. However, the court rejected the plea, stating that the ED is not the investigating agency in the matter.
The investigation in the JKCA scam was conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which had already filed its charge sheet. The judge said the ED cannot introduce new offences in a case that has been investigated and prosecuted by another agency.
“The power of ED to investigate and enquire stands mainly connected to the offence of money laundering as defined in the PMLA. ED cannot assume from the material gathered by it, that a predicate offence stands committed. The predicate offence has to be necessarily investigated and tried by the authorities empowered by law. In the instant case, the CBI which is the main investigating and prosecuting agency did not incorporate any scheduled offence in the charge sheet,” the court said.
“Therefore, the applicant has no locus standi as per the law to seek addition of charge in the present case as such the instant application on behalf of ED is not maintainable.”
The court, quoting the judgment of High Court of Madras in a case titled as R K M Powergen Private Limited versus the Assistant Director and Others, 2025, said that “the ED is not a super cop to investigate anything and everything which comes to its notice.”
“There should be a criminal activity which attracts the schedule to PMLA and on account of such criminal activity, there should have been proceeds of crime. It is only then the jurisdiction of ED commences,” the Court said, adding application of the ED is not made out and it is accordingly dismissed and disposed of.
In 2018, the CBI filed a charge sheet against Farooq Abdullah and several others in connection with the JKCA scam. They were accused of allegedly misappropriating around Rs 43 crore from funds that were granted by the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI). The CBI had taken over the case from the J&K police in 2015 on the orders of a division bench of the Jammu and Kashmir High Court.
According to the CBI, the funds were siphoned off between 2002 and 2011, during the period when Abdullah was serving as the president of the JKCA. In the charge sheet, the agency also named three other accused: former JKCA general secretary Mohammad Saleem Khan, former treasurer Ahsan Ahmad Mirza, and Jammu & Kashmir Bank executive Bashir Ahmad Misgar.
