Sanjeev Nanda and his short-lived freedom

Sanjeev Nanda, an accused in the BMW hit and run case, who got his passport recently after a 18-month legal battle following an order of the CBI court is cooling his heels in CBI custody in an Income Tax case.

The CBI court on Tuesday remanded him to the custody of the premier investigating agency till March 14 for alleged manipulation of evidence in the Income Tax case.

Nanda had managed to get his travel document following judge I K Kochhar's order on March one after the CBI said it had no objections to his leaving the country.

His counsel Ramesh Gupta, while objecting to his custody, claimed that Sanjeev was on his way to Dubai and had gone to see his father (Suresh Nanda) when the CBI nabbed him from a five-star hotel in Mumbai along with his chartered accountant Bipin Shah and Income Tax Deputy Director Ashutosh Verma.

"Sanjeev was incidentally in Mumbai to meet a banker and he was scheduled to leave for Dubai and he did not know the purpose of the alleged meeting in the hotel," Gupta said and argued that CBI had cited no specific grounds for his arrest.

"CBI has made no specific grounds for his arrest, and if there were any, they were against his father. So why him," he said.

The CBI had seized the passports of Suresh Nanda and Sanjeev in a raid at their premises in the national capital on October 10, 2006.