The Enforcement Directorate has approached the Supreme Court challenging a May 29 Delhi High Court order that quashed an FIR registered by Delhi Police's Economic Offences Wing against Newsclick founder Prabir Purkayastha. Justice Neena Bansal Krishna delivered the ruling. The ED's money-laundering case under PMLA is linked to the predicate FIR; quashing the underlying FIR directly threatens the ED's scheduled offence basis, prompting its appeal to the Supreme Court.

This case sits at the intersection of two critical criminal-law doctrines: the dependency of a PMLA prosecution on a 'scheduled offence,' and the High Court's inherent power under Section 482 CrPC (now Section 528 BNSS) to quash FIRs.

Under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, the ED can prosecute money laundering only if the alleged proceeds arise from a 'scheduled offence' — a predicate crime listed in the PMLA Schedule. If the predicate FIR itself is quashed, the legal foundation for the money-laundering charge collapses, because there is no longer a cognizable scheduled offence from which proceeds could have been 'generated.' This is the core vulnerability the ED is fighting.

The Delhi HC used its Section 482 CrPC power — which allows quashing of FIRs to prevent abuse of process or secure ends of justice — to nullify the Economic Offences Wing FIR. The ED argues that its PMLA case is an independent statutory proceeding and should survive even if the predicate FIR is quashed.

The Supreme Court has previously addressed this tension: in Vijay Madanlal Choudhary v. Union of India (2022), a three-judge bench upheld the constitutional validity of PMLA's stringent provisions. However, the specific question of whether quashing a predicate FIR automatically terminates the ED case remains contested and is precisely the issue the Supreme Court must now resolve. This makes the case a live test of how independent the PMLA machinery truly is from its predicate-offence anchor.