India, Aug. 22 -- The Delhi High Court has criticised the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for seeking to sustain a money-laundering case by adding another FIR registered six years ago, even after the original case forming the basis of the proceedings had been closed by a court.

A bench of Justice Anish Dayal, in a 115-page judgment released on Thursday, observed that such conduct raised serious concerns. The court said that accepting such a course would give the ED an "untrammelled licence" to continually rope in earlier FIRs even where their connection to the alleged offence was tenuous or based on a slender factual thread merely to keep an ECIR (ED's FIR) alive.

"In the present matter, however, the first FIR predated the ECIR and continu...