PMLA 2002’s Gremlins: Anatomizing the Labyrinth of Recent Amendments and Precedent

Abstract

Enacted to regulate the incubus of organized crime, India’s Prevention of Money Laundering Act has quickly degenerated into interpretative chaos, with conflicting judicial opinions straining its otherwise sound provisions. Instead of chastening statutory mercuriality, close to eleven amendments to the Act have only fuelled incertitude further. The most damaging feature of the PMLA’s disarray is that the interpretive conflict eclipses the most basic punitive machinery of the Act. Part 2 of the article clarifies the relationship between the offence of money laundering and its predicate offences in the realm of how the latter ought to influence property attachment and prosecution proceedings for the former. Part 3 dissects the complication of Indian Criminal Procedure’s applicability to investigations under the PMLA and proposes an inventive two-step enquiry to determine the extent of said applicability in view of the provisions of both statutes. Part 4 chronicles the peculiar acquiescence of some Indian courts in not insisting upon furnishing written grounds of arrest to a detenu and explains why that jurisprudential course deserves to be abandoned. Lastly, Part 5 addresses the topical disputation of the effect of recent amendments on the potential revival of sui generis bail conditions under the PMLA that had previously been declared unconstitutional. The article presents a syncretism of recommended interpretative paths that the judiciary must take to remedy the recognized flaws.