Karti Chidambaram barred from going abroad

The Supreme Court on Monday barred Karti Chidambaram, son of former finance minister P Chidambaram, from leaving India and stayed a Madras High Court order allowing him to do so. Karti is facing graft charges.
 
The court said he should not go abroad till his petition in the high court against the First Information Report has been decided. The investigation should not suffer, the court observed. The case will be heard again on Friday. The Madras High Court had stayed a look-out notice issued against him. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Monday moved an urgent petition against this. Additional Solicitor Tushar Mehta argued the agency wanted to interrogate him and not arrest him. Karti’s petitions challenging the FIR against him and the issue of the jurisdiction of the high court were pending in Chennai. Meanwhile, he should join the investigation, the counsel said. The court also asked Karti, a businessman and a member of the Congress Party, to cooperate with the investigation. He had been summoned twice but not responded, the court observed. It said if he was abroad, he should have shown his bonafides by requesting suitable date for examination. “That was the least he should have done,” the court said.

 
The counsel for Karti, Gopal Subramanium, said the CBI had issued a look-out notice even before he could join the investigation. He came to know about the notice only when he moved writ petitions in the high court. The notice has interfered with his fundamental right to go abroad; he is not a fugitive, the counsel asserted. When he described the events leading to the FIR, the judges told him they were not interested in the facts of the case but the focus was only on the look-out notice.
 
According to CBI, Karti received kickbacks amounting to Rs 3.5 crore from a private company, the INX media, in exchange for allowing them to make foreign investment. This was done through "influence in the finance ministry" while his father was the finance minister, investigators have claimed. The former minister had denied the allegation.