Provisional attachment requires an original statutory foundation; later FIRs cannot retrospectively validate seizure, retention, or freezing measures.
Provisional attachment, seizure, retention and freezing measures must rest on the material, reasons to believe, complaint and application that originally grounded them. Later FIRs, an ECIR addendum or a subsequent prosecution complaint cannot retrospectively validate measures founded solely on an original FIR; they require an independent statutory basis. Quashing the original FIR does not itself eliminate every predicate offence where subsequent FIRs disclose such offences. Yet those FIRs cannot support confirmation of challenged measures unless they formed part of the original statutory foundation.
Issues: (i) Whether the impugned provisional attachment, seizure, retention, and freezing orders could be sustained on subsequent FIRs, an ECIR addendum, and a prosecution complaint not forming part of the underlying attachment, reasons to believe, original complaint, or original application? (ii) Whether quashing of the original FIR meant that no predicate offence remained?
Issue (i): Whether the impugned provisional attachment, seizure, retention, and freezing orders could be sustained on subsequent FIRs, an ECIR addendum, and a prosecution complaint not forming part of the underlying attachment, reasons to believe, original complaint, or original application?
Analysis: The statutory attachment and seizure framework requires the action and its adjudicatory confirmation to rest on the material forming the basis of the provisional attachment order, the recorded reasons to believe, the original complaint, and the original application. Those foundational materials referred only to the original FIR. The subsequent FIRs, their allegations, the quantified proceeds allegedly involved therein, and the role attributed under them were absent from those materials. An ECIR addendum and a subsequently filed prosecution complaint could provide a basis for separate action, but could not retrospectively validate the existing measures.
Conclusion: The impugned attachment, retention, and freezing measures could not be sustained by relying on the subsequent FIRs, ECIR addendum, or subsequent prosecution complaint. This issue is in favour of the appellants.
Issue (ii): Whether quashing of the original FIR meant that no predicate offence remained?
Analysis: Subsequent FIRs disclosed predicate offences and were incorporated through an addendum to the ECIR. Their existence meant that the quashing of the original FIR did not, by itself, establish that no predicate offence remained. However, those subsequent FIRs could not be considered for confirming the challenged measures because they were not part of the original complaint or original application.
Conclusion: Quashing of the original FIR did not by itself mean that no predicate offence remained. This issue is against the appellants.
Final Conclusion: Statutory attachment, retention, and freezing action founded solely on the original FIR cannot be validated by later, unincorporated allegations; any action based on the subsequent FIRs requires an independent statutory foundation.
Ratio Decidendi: Provisional attachment and consequential retention or freezing measures must be justified by the material and proceeds of crime identified in their statutory foundation and cannot be retrospectively sustained through subsequent FIRs or materials not forming part of that foundation.