BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court on Monday, issued a notice to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in connection with a petition filed by Central Arecanut and Cocoa Marketing and Processing Cooperative Limited (Campco), Mangaluru, challenging the rejection of its request to exchange demonetised notes which were a part of court proceedings.
Hearing the petition, Justice A S Bopanna issued notice to Birur police as well. The petitioner contended that the notes worth 2.51 lakh were a part of the court proceedings before demonetisation and there was no mention of serial numbers of the notes in the chargesheet and hence there was no documents to show the same. The investigating officers recovered the currency from the accused in April 2015 and submitted mahazar report to the court as usual without any clue about what it would do. Therefore, the lapse on the part of the police was not deliberate, the petitioner claimed.
Campco contended that, before demonetisation, Marketing Manager of Shivamogga branch on April 18, 2015 registered a complaint before the Birur police alleging that the cash was stolen from the office. A week later, the police recovered `2.51 lakh from three accused who were employees of the petitioner. Finally, the court released the money recovered from the accused on May 31, 2017. Then, Campco requested the RBI to permit them to exchange it. However, RBI did not consider it as the serial numbers of the notes were not mentioned in the chargesheet and they had no documents.
According to the petition, the RBI issued a communication dated July 19, 2017 wherein it has clarified that unless the Campco produced the copy of court’s order containing serial numbers of the notes for the said numbers noted by the investigating agency or produced the notes of the court, their request can’t be considered.