Chennai: Over the Enforcement Directorate's move of attaching properties worth Rs 10.11 crore belonging to Tamil film director S Shankar in connection with a copyright infringement complaint, the Madras High Court issued an interim stay on the central probe agency’s proceedings on Tuesday, The New Indian Express reported.
Shankar was named in a copyright infringement complaint related to the story of the Rajnikanth-starrer Enthiran.
The court of Justices MS Ramesh and N. Senthilkumar issued the interim stay order while hearing petitions by the director seeking quashing of ED’s provisional attachment order, which was passed on 17 February 2025 under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
It was writer Arur Tamilnadan who filed the copyright infringement complaint against Shankar in 2011, alleging that the director copied his story Jiguba. A case was filed on the basis of the complaint in a metropolitan magistrate court, citing a violation of Section 63 of the Copyright Act and a criminal complaint under Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. The ED ED took note of this complaint and moved forward with the provisional attachment order.
The court observed that ED must not have taken such an action since the High Court had stayed proceedings in the scheduled offence in 2023.
The court order read, “The provisional attachment order is based on the allegations made in the civil suit relating to copyright infringement, apart from the allegations in the criminal complaint. When this court had taken cognisance of the fact that the civil suit was dismissed and entertained the petition to quash the proceedings relating to the scheduled offence, the respondents ought not to have provisionally attached the properties under the order dated 17 February 2025, more particularly when a stay was in operation for the past three years,” The New Indian Express quoted.