"Disturbing": Delhi HC rebukes Indian Express for news reports to influence court proceedings in ED case

The Delhi High Court on Monday sharply criticised The Indian Express for publishing a series of articles on an alleged fake cancer drug racket while the court was hearing bail petitions filed by several accused in a connected money laundering case..Justice Girish Kathpalia observed that news stories published on the paper’s front page for four consecutive days were not confined to reportage of the offences. Rather, they transgressed all permissible bounds by purporting to anticipate and answer queries which were raised by the court to the counsel for the Enforcement Directorate [ED], the judge said. “More egregiously, those articles laid bare the WhatsApp chats allegedly exchanged between the accused/applicants inter se, without the slightest attempt at redaction or anonymisation,” the Court noted.The news stories were published in The Indian Express in April 2026 as part of Express Investigation. .Justice Kathpalia said that the articles were not innocent publications. The Court said that it was refraining from giving any definitive finding of culpability against the paper, ED or the accused only due to lack of cogent material. Calling the development “deeply disturbing,” the Court warned that if such publications were orchestrated by the State to influence proceedings, they would strike at the “very roots of the Rule of Law” and undermine judicial independence. “Such conduct would be not just deplorable, but also amount to grave and impermissible assault on the independence of the judiciary and sanctity of the adjudicatory process. The spectre of proceedings being sought to be influenced through media use of such nature is not just unacceptable but deeply disquieting and must be unequivocally deprecated,” the Court underscored. However, it added that no Court would be influenced by such articles while adjudicating a case since its mind is “attuned to be phlegm to such efforts”. “The purpose of above narration is to put across a word of caution so that such act is not repeated in future,” the Court added. .The observations came in a common judgment granting bail to five accused – Parvez Khan, Neeraj Chauhan, Rajesh Kumar, Suraj Shat and Lovee Narula -- in a case investigated by the ED under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). According to the prosecution, the case stemmed from a 2024 Delhi Police probe into a syndicate allegedly involved in manufacturing and distributing spurious anti-cancer drugs. Investigators claim the group refilled empty vials of expensive medicines such as Keytruda and Opdyta with other substances and sold them to patients. Subsequently, the ED registered a case of money laundering and arrested several persons. The Court today allowed all five bail applications. .[Read Judgment]