Raj Kundra’s anticipatory bail plea to be heard today by a Mumbai court

Businessman Raj Kundra, who is currently in judicial custody after being arrested on July 19 on charges of producing pornographic content, has an anticipatory bail hearing scheduled for Saturday at a Mumbai sessions court. The case is related to creating of porn content and was registered by Mumbai Police last year.

Kundra approached the sessions court on June 11 seeking anticipatory bail in the case filed by the Maharashtra Police’s cyber cell last year. The matter had come up for hearing before the sessions court on August 2, and the court had reserved its hearing till August 7.

Kundra and his IT associate Ryan Thorpe were arrested by property cell of the Mumbai crime branch in connection with a pornography film racket. The property cell has claimed that Kundra’s company Armspine was behind the app ‘Hotshots’, where the businessman used to upload pornographic content. The app was later sold to a London-based company called Kenrin Pvt Ltd, which the property cell claims is owned by Kundra’s brother-in-law. They also claimed that Kundra charged a subscription fee to users of the app and earned over ₹1.17 crore between August and December of last year.

The metropolitan magistrate court refused bail to both Kundra and Thorpe on August 4 and took note of claims by the property cell of both Kundra and Thorpe deleting data that had the potential to become incriminating. Public prosecutor Aruna Kamat Pai had levelled allegations of the accused deleting evidence to Bombay high court on August 2. “They (Kundra and Thorpe) were found deleting certain WhatsApp chats. The attitude of the applicant Raj Kundra speaks volume of his cooperation in the investigation. We do not know how much data has been deleted. The police are still trying to retrieve it,” Pai had said.