Discouraging outcomes seen in earlier SC monitoring of CBI misuse-of-office probes.
The Supreme Court today announced it would monitor the investigation the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was conducting into the 2G telecom spectrum allocation.
The beginnings are not auspicious. Today, when the court directed CBI to place its report in court in a sealed cover by February 10, 2011, the latter’s counsel, K K Venugopal protested.
Opposing a petition by a Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL), for the apex court’s monitoring of the 2G spectrum probe, Venugopal said any such move at this stage would “prejudice” the rights of the accused when they were chargesheeted. Surprised, the bench of Justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly quipped, “You are not appearing for the accused, is it?”
Venugopal said, “Though I do not hold the brief for the accused, what we have investigated so far is being debated in public domain.” Considering the “voluminous documents and reams of telephone transcripts” of corporate lobbyist Nira Radia with persons linked to the scam, he said, the agency would require time till March 2011 to complete the investigation. The senior advocate urged the Supreme Court not to monitor the case progress “till such time” to prevent further information from coming into public domain.
However, this is not the first time the Supreme Court had decided to monitor a CBI probe.
In 1991, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had raided a hawala dealer, S K Jain’s farm house in Delhi and recovered Rs 90 lakh in cash and a diary, which allegedly revealed the identity of politicians and bureaucrats who were recipients of money from Jain for awarding lucrative contracts in the power sector.
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The diary entries indicated Rs 65.47 crore had been paid to 115 people over 1988-91. Of this, Rs 53.5 crore was illegally transferred to India via hawala channels. The payoffs were allegedly made around 1988-1989, during the final months of the Rajiv Gandhi regime.The so-called Jain diaries, were dismissed by the CBI in court as “uncorroborated oral statements”. P V Narasimha Rao was Prime Minister.
The court said it was taking over the investigation. Investigative agencies reported the progress at each step to the Supreme Court, in closed-door hearings. After court approval, cases were registered and prosecution launched.
The Jain hawala case was one CBI stumbled on by accident, while probing the funding of insurgents. But it was converted into a corruption case: Politicians and militants were recipients of illegal money from the same foreign sources. Ultimately, not a single politician among the over 40 accused was convicted. The only one who was being a Kashmiri separatist who allegedly received the hawala money from the same sources as the politicians
Another case where the SC took similar charge was also during Rao’s tenure. Allegations were made of his involvement with ‘Godman’ Chandra Swami, who had allegedly played a crucial part in implicating the previous Prime Minister, V P Singh, in a forged case involving bank accounts in an offshore tax haven, St Kitts. Chandra Swami, S K Jain and Narasimha Rao were all allegedly linked in both cases. On that occasion, not only did the SC order CBI to bunch all cases involving Chandra Swami but also said CBI must not close the case “even on orders from the authority that exercises administrative control over the organisation”.
Ultimately, the CBI arrested Narasimha Rao in the St Kitts case at his residence but he was released on bail in a few hours. But that was only after the government headed by him went out of power. The court then acquitted Rao but framed charges of criminal conspiracy against Chandra Swami. In 2004, he was also acquitted of these charges.