A director of defunct East-West Airlines (India), who was sentenced to six months imprisonment in December 2022 on corruption charges, has had his appeal bail continued by a Mumbai High Court judge.
According to the Indian Express outlet, Justice Sarang V Kotwal allowed Faizal Wahid's ongoing release on bail on January 20 after his legal representatives lodged an appeal against the sentence and said any role Wahid had in a scheme to defraud the Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOCL) while at the airline was purely vicarious and that he had played no active part in the fraud.
East-West Airlines operated scheduled domestic passenger services out of Mumbai between 1992 and 1996. During that time, airline officials, along with a Vijaya Bank official, defrauded the IOCL of INR17.3 million rupees (USD212,349 dollars) using fake drafts of demand. Copies of purchase orders were faxed to the oil company, who then provided the fuel, but the required original purchase orders were never sent and the bank official, also jailed in December, failed to debit the cost of the fuel from the airline's accounts.
Eight airline officials plus the bank official were ultimately charged by Indian authorities in 2001. In the subsequent two decades, four of the defendants died, and in December, a further three East-West Airlines officials were acquitted, leaving Wahid and the bank official as the only defendants found guilty and sentenced.
Last week, Kotwal was persuaded to continue Wahid's bail, saying that he had been on bail before without incident. "The sentence is short," said the judge. "The appeal is not likely to be decided within that short period. Considering all these factors, the applicant can be granted bail pending the final disposal of his appeal."
