SC order on Khaleda’s bail now Wednesday

The Supreme Court will now deliver its verdict tomorrow on the appeals against the High Court order that granted bail to BNP chief Khaleda Zia in Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case.

A four-member bench of the Appellate Division headed by Chief Justice Syed Mahmud Hussain was set to announce the judgment on the appeals today.

But the court deferred the date after Attorney General Mahbubey Alam and Khaleda Zia’s lawyer Advocate Jainul Abedin placed some arguments in the afternoon.

When the bench sat around 9:50am, the attorney general told the court that he wanted to place some more arguments.

The AG said he could not complete placing arguments on May 9 as the court witnessed commotion from some lawyers on that day.

After their submissions, the bench re-fixed the date for the verdict.  

The High Court on March 12 had granted bail to the BNP chairperson, now in jail, in the Zia Orphanage Trust corruption case.

Later, the Anti-Corruption Commission and the government moved the appeals before the Appellate Division of the SC challenging the bail order.

On February 8, the Special Judge's Court-5 of Dhaka sentenced Khaleda to jail after it had found her and five others guilty in the graft case.

The court sentenced Khaleda's elder son Tarique Rahman, now in the UK, and four others to 10 years' rigorous imprisonment each, and fined them a total of Tk 2.10 crore, saying that all the convicts have to pay the fine in equal amounts.

The ACC had filed the case with Ramna Police Station in July 2008, accusing the six of misappropriating over Tk 2.1 crore that came from a foreign bank as grants for orphans.