VIGILANCE MANUAL VOLUME III - AP Online

196 DECISION - 4
other monies of the Bank with which it was deposited. The other
property of the petitioners might be attachable, but money in the hands
of their bankers is not so.
The Lahore High Court held that there is no force in that
contention. It cannot be disputed that the bankers with whom the
money was deposited were the debtors and agents of the petitioners
and the money in their hands did not cease to be attachable even if
its identity was lost by getting mixed up with the other money as long
as it was not converted into anything else and remained liable to be
paid back in cash to the petitioners or to their order. The petitioners
cannot be in that case regarded to cease to be the owners of the
money deposited by them although it may not have remained in their
physical possession and may have come into their debtor’s or agent’s
possession on their behalf. If, after converting say a Government
Currency Note of the value of Rs. 100 into 20 Government Currency
Notes of Rs. 5 each, the petitioners can still be regarded to have
procured Rs.100 by means of an offence—assuming for the purposes
of this argument that the original note of Rs. 100 had been procured
by means of an offence—there can be no doubt that the twenty notes
of Rs. 5 each would have to be, even after their conversion, regarded
as having been procured by means of an offence although no offence
may have been committed for the purpose of converting the former
into the latter. The currency of the country is interchangeable and
the stigma attaching to the first acquisition would continue to attach
under sec. 3 of the Ordinance to any other monies in the hands of
the petitioners or of their debtors and agents and could not be held to
have been removed by its conversion into money of some other
denomination. The last words of sec. 3(1) of the Ordinance “where
property other than what was procured by means of an offence has
been declared to be liable to attachment” can only refer to cases
either when the money or property originally procured by the alleged
offender by means of an offence has been spent in acquiring the
property which is declared to be attachable or when the money or
property originally procured cannot be traced and other property of
like value—which would also cover the offender’s private money—