Bombay HC asks Maharashtra govt to investigate how Sonu Sood, MLA Zeeshan Siddique procured COVID-19 medicine | Hindi Movie News – Bollywood – Times of India

Reel-hero turned real-hero Sonu Sood, who became a household name for his extraordinary humanitarian work, has been helping people since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, the Bombay High Court directed the Maharashtra government to scrutinise the role that local Congress MLA Zeeshan Siddique and actor Sonu Sood played in procurement and supply of anti-COVID drugs to citizens, following their SOS calls and appeals on social media. The high court also observed that ‘these people (celebrities) projected themselves as some kind of messiahs without verifying if the drugs were spurious or if the supply was legal.’ A bench of Justices S P Deshmukh and G S Kulkarni issued the direction to the Maharashtra government after state Advocate General Ashutosh Kumbhakoni told the HC that it had registered a criminal case at the Mazgaon metropolitan court against a charitable trust, BDR Foundation, and its trustees for supplying anti-COVID drug Remdesivir to Siddique even though the trust did not have requisite licence. Kumbhakoni said that Siddique had been merely diverting the drug to citizens, who had approached him, so no action had been taken against him yet. He further said that Sonu Sood had received the drugs from several pharmacies located inside the private Lifeline Care Hospital in Goregaon. Pharma company Cipla had supplied Remdesivir to these pharmacies and inquiry into it was still going on. He was responding to previous orders of the high court passed while hearing a bunch of public interest litigations (PILs) on several issues related to the management of drugs and resources required to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. The HC had directed the state government and the Centre to probe how celebrities and politicians had managed to procure and distribute anti-coronavirus drugs to the public when the supply of the same was scarce and was supposed to be allocated to states by the Union government.

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