Uddhav Thackeray denied permission to meet Sanjay Raut in Jail

According to a senior jail official quoted by news agency PTI on Wednesday (September 7, 2022), officials urged Shiv Sena leader and former chief minister of Maharashtra Uddhav Thackeray to get court authorization before visiting party MP and incarcerated member Sanjay Raut.

The Arthur Road prison in downtown Mumbai is where Raut is now being held after being detained in early August in connection with a money laundering case involving suspected irregularities in the reconstruction of a Mumbai “chawl” (old row tenement).

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PTI reports that a few days before, a caller posing as a Thackeray agent informed the prison authorities that Uddhav wanted to visit Raut in the jailer’s quarters.

Prison officials, however, refused to let the Shiv Sena president meet with his close aide and urged his attorney to get permission from the court.

PTI reported the official, adding, “Any contact with Raut would have to take place in accordance with norms defined for regular convicts and that too only after the court’s sanction.”

He said that the prison administration had not received written applications, but he would not say who made the phone call or what day he contacted the administration.