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“We are not alleging any quid pro quo against P C Parakh,” a senior official of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) explained to media persons amid a volley of questions on the former coal secretary’s statement that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh as the then coal minister, too, should have been named in the first information report (FIR) on the coal allocation scam.
Quid pro quo means to get something in return for something else.
“No bribe taken and no favours asked,” the official said. While the CBI made a case in spite of the absence of a quid pro quo, prompting questions, legal experts pointed out that abuse of official position alone is a serious charge against a civil servant.
“A civil servant by colluding with a private company may not be taking any favours right then, but he is making himself available for future use while he is in service or after,” said a senior lawyer. Since the Prevention of Corruption Act does not state what a bureaucrat can or cannot do after retirement, it does not help in putting a cap on corruption, he argued.
Besides, the officer in-charge has been made a “custodian of the country’s natural resource”, which in the current case are the coal blocks. If such a position is used to give unfair advantage to any party over these resources, it is a culpable offence, said another lawyer. According to him, it does not matter whether it results in a personal benefit or not.
However, experts maintained that in naming a bureaucrat and not the prime decision making authority, the CBI is not giving a closure to a case, but putting a cloak on it.
“You cannot hold a civil servant liable to the extent that he was following a policy and as long as he was not acting in defiance of the minister in-charge. Policy is the domain of the minister and along with the bureaucrat, they have a collective responsibility to the legislature. If one is responsible, so is the other,” said Aman Lekhi, senior advocate.
In the 2G spectrum scam, the then telecom minister, A Raja, was made an accused along with the then telecom secretary Siddharth Behura. However, Raja insisted that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was kept in the loop for spectrum allocation decisions, thus asking him to share the responsibility.
