NEW DELHI: The Centre on Monday assured the Supreme Court that the Enforcement Directorate’s director Sanjay Kumar Mishra would not get a further extension in service beyond November.
He got a third extension only because of the ongoing evaluation by the Paris-based Financial Action Task Force (FATF), it reiterated. A bench led by Justice B R Gavai, while reserving its verdict in pleas challenging extension of tenure, wondered if the FATF angle was an afterthought.
“This officer (Mishra) is not some DGP of any state but an officer representing the country in a United Nations-like body and is in the midst of something. This court must not interfere with his tenure. This officer cannot continue after November 2023. But right now the peer review of FATF is going on. It was supposed to happen in 2019, but could not due to COVID… Nobody is indispensable. No organisation becomes ineffective in the absence of one particular individual, but the presence of an officer who has been heading the institution for the past three years makes a difference,” Solicitor General Tushar Mehta submitted before the bench.