New Delhi/Hyderabad: The Supreme Court earlier this month expressed displeasure with the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) over the inordinate delay in commencing trial in the graft case against former Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy.
A bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna, Sanjay Kumar and R. Mahadevan posted the matter for further hearing to the week commencing 11 November.
More than 10 years after Jagan was arrested on charges of accumulating disproportionate assets, 11 chargesheets have been filed by the CBI and nine prosecution complaints registered by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), but the trial is yet to take off.
The president of YSRCP, Jagan has been out on bail since late 2013.
“The court was peeved that the trial has not commenced yet. As directions were passed earlier to expedite the proceedings, the court did not give any such instructions now,” advocate Balaji Srinivasan told ThePrint.
Srinivasan represents former YSRCP leader K. Raghu Rama Krishna Raju, now an MLA of Andhra Pradesh’s ruling TDP, who had filed petitions in the Supreme Court last year questioning delay in trial, seeking directions for cancellation of Jagan’s bail and transfer of the grouped graft cases against him from Hyderabad.
Jagan, who represented Kadapa in the Lok Sabha from 2009 to 2014, was arrested by the CBI in May 2012 and remained lodged in a Hyderabad jail till his bail in September 2013. He served as the Opposition leader in Andhra Pradesh from 2014 to 2019, and then stormed to power as CM for the next five, till this year when the TDP won the assembly polls.
According to the poll affidavit filed by Jagan prior to this year’s state polls, there are 29 pending criminal cases against him, including 11 being probed by the CBI pertaining to charges of cheating, criminal conspiracy and those under the Prevention of Corruption Act, and nine cases of money laundering being investigated by the ED.
In November last year, the apex court had asked the CBI for the reasons behind the delay in starting trial in the graft cases related to the YSRCP chief. Raju had alleged in his plea to the court that “the complacent CBI was playing a friendly match with the accused, not taking the criminal trial to a logical end”.
This April, the court ordered the CBI to file an affidavit explaining the delay and give a response to Raju’s petition seeking cancellation of Jagan’s bail.
The CBI denied all the allegations against it in its affidavit and listed an understaffed trial court in Hyderabad and a large number of witnesses and documents to be examined (911 witnesses and 1,671 documents in the 11 group cases) as the reasons behind the delay in trial. ThePrint has accessed a copy of the affidavit, in which the agency has also opposed Raju’s pleas.
While the YSRCP has provided crucial support to the BJP-led NDA in Parliament in the passage of several bills and Jagan has maintained a cordial equation with the BJP leadership in the last five years, the TDP has often portrayed his frequent meetings with PM Narendra Modi in New Delhi as intended to seek protection from the CBI.
ThePrint takes a look at all the cases and chargesheets against Jagan and what is leading to delay.
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How it all started
Graft allegations were first made against Jagan in 2011 when then Congress MLA P. Shankar Rao filed a writ petition in the Andhra Pradesh High Court seeking a CBI probe into his assets.
It was alleged that Jagan had amassed wealth through allotment of lands, mines and licences to individuals and companies in return for investment in his firms while his father Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy (YSR) was Andhra CM from 2004 to 2009.
YSR, a Congress leader, died in a chopper crash in 2009 and Jagan subsequently exited the party and formed the YSRCP in 2011, claiming his father’s political legacy.
The Congress-led UPA-II was in power when the CBI in August 2011, on the orders of the Andhra Pradesh High Court, filed a case against Jagan and 73 others, including firms which had allegedly invested in Jagan’s companies for the benefits extended by the Andhra government.
After the initial FIR, the CBI filed 11 chargesheets over the next few years. It also arrested Jagan on 27 May, 2012.
In September 2013, the agency filed a completion report of the investigation before the special court in Hyderabad, in which it flagged irregularities in the matters of 16 companies which was then forwarded to the income tax department and the ED for further investigation.
The ED came into the picture and sought access to the chargesheets filed by the CBI against Jagan and, after approval from the special CBI court in Hyderabad, the federal probe agency, too, filed cases against him alleging money laundering and embezzlement.
While the ED has filed nine prosecution complaints against the former Andhra CM, charges have not been framed in even one.
Jagan has been out on bail since September 2013 while the 11th and last chargesheet was filed by the CBI in September 2014.
What the chargesheets detail
The first CBI chargesheet pertains to a land parcel measuring 150 acres which Jagan had allegedly got allotted to pharma companies for half the price and in turn received kickbacks in the form of investment into his companies. The CBI also named in its chargesheets IAS officers who allegedly favoured Jagan.
Detailing charges on 31 March, 2012, the CBI named Jagan, his aide V. Vijayasai Reddy and Aurobindo Pharma and Hetero Drugs, and alleged that Jagan exerted pressure on IAS officer B.P. Acharya who subsequently allotted 150 acres of land in a green industrial park of Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (APIIC) to the pharma groups at a meagre cost of Rs 7 lakh per acre while the government-fixed rate of the land was between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 20 lakh per acre.
The agency had alleged that this move caused a loss of Rs 12.26 crore to the APIIC.
The chargesheet further claimed that approximately 30 acres of land allotted to Aurobindo Pharma in Medak district by APIIC was illegally transferred to Trident Life Sciences by showing it to be a 100 percent subsidiary of the former, in exchange of which Aurobindo’s managing director K. Nityananda Reddy infused Rs 10 crore into Jagan-owned firms Janani Infra and Jagathi Publications.
Hetero Drugs infused Rs 17.25 crore in the form of investment in the two companies of Jagan Mohan Reddy, the agency has alleged.
In the second chargesheet, the CBI alleged that Jagan conspired with auditors and his financial advisors to infuse funds from individual investors in exchange for favours from the government led by his father.
The agency made Jagan the prime accused in its third chargesheet as well, filed in May 2012, and alleged that a firm named Ramky Group controlled by Ayodhya Rami Reddy pocketed a whopping Rs 133 crore by selling 914 acres of land in 2,400-acre Ramky Pharmacity residential complex in Visakhapatnam. This could be done because the YSR government reduced the required green cover width from 250 metres to only 50 metres, according to the CBI.
For this favourable policy change, the agency alleged that Ramky Group invested Rs 10 crore in Jagathi Publications.
In its fourth chargesheet, the CBI had added then roads and buildings minister Dharmana Prasada Rao and two senior IAS officers — Manmohan Singh and M. Samuel — as accused along with Jagan and Vijayasai Reddy and claimed that the state government provided “undue” concessions for the proposed development of an integrated port and industrial corridor in Prakasam and Guntur districts. This allegedly benefitted the promoter of the VANPIC project in the districts, industrialist Nimmagadda Prasad, and he returned the favour by investing Rs 854 crore in the companies belonging to Jagan.
The CBI filed the next four chargesheets naming cement companies Dalmia Cement, India Cements, Raghuram Cement (marketed as Bharathi since 2009), and Penna Cement as accused entities along with Jagan and Vijaysai Reddy.
The agency also booked then state home minister Sabitha Indra Reddy and alleged that she had overlooked norms as mining minister to extend the leases of Dalmia Cement for which the firm invested a sum of Rs 95 crore into the companies of Jagan.
In the chargesheet naming India Cements, the agency alleged that the YSR-led government had allocated to the company 13 million cubic feet of water from Kagna River in Ranga Reddy district along with permission to draw an additional 1,00,000 gallons of water per day from the Krishna River in Nalgonda district, and extended milestone mining lease for 25 years in Kadapa district.
The agency had alleged that, in return, India Cements had invested Rs 140 crore in Jagan’s companies Jagathi Publications and Bharathi cements. Jagan’s family controls 49 percent in Bharathi Cements and his wife Y.S. Bharathi Reddy is the director of the firm.
With relations to Penna Cements, the agency had alleged that the firm had invested Rs 25 crore in Jagathi Publications and Rs 23 crore in Carmel Asia belonging to Jagan in exchange of lease for limestone mining in 231 acres in Anantapur district, 760 acres in Kurnool district and transfer of lease from Walchand Cements to Penna in Ranga Reddy district.
The agency filed its ninth and tenth chargesheets naming two firms — Indu Techzone and Lepakshi Knowledge Hub (LKH) — as accused and alleged that LKH promoter Shyam Prasad Reddy had made investments in Jagan’s firms for land allocations between 2004 and 2009.
The agency also alleged that Indu Techzone was created as a special purpose vehicle (SPV) and was allotted parcels of land in Shamshabad to develop a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) in exchange for which the owner firm, Indu Projects, invested in Jagan-owned firms.
Indu Projects also featured as an accused in the 11th chargesheet filed by the CBI in September 2014. The agency alleged that the firm made an investment worth Rs 70 crore in companies owned by Jagan for benefits obtained between 2004 and 2009.
In all, 125 individuals or companies have been named as accused in the 11 chargesheets.
The probe agency has termed Jagan as the “principal beneficiary of all the quid pro quo transactions” and named him as “Accused No. 1” in all its chargesheets.
It has further charged V. Vijaysai Reddy (a Chartered Accountant by profession, YSRCP’s national general secretary and parliamentary party leader now) as having “acted as Jagan’s agent and demanded and obtained bribes and channelised them under the false cover of investments, using false and antedated valuation reports and who masterminded the financial fraud”. He is named in all the chargesheets as “Accused No. 2”.
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CBI’s stand in court
During the hearing of Raju’s petitions in the SC in April, Additional Solicitor General S.V. Raju had attributed the delay in trial to the high number of discharge petitions filed by the accused persons.
Subsequently, a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and Dipankar Dutta ordered the CBI to file an affidavit explaining the reasons behind the delay within four weeks.
Further, it said that Raju’s plea of transfer of cases would be taken up along with his other plea seeking cancellation of Jagan’s bail.
The probe agency submitted that the CBI court in Hyderabad was understaffed, with one additional special judge holding charge of three courts and the principal special judge conducting trials in several other sensitive cases, apart from CBI cases from Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai offices.
“In the light of above-mentioned facts and circumstances, filling up the posts of two additional special judges in Hyderabad CBI court and designating the court of principal judge as the special court for conducting day-to-day trial may expedite the trial proceedings in Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy group cases,” the CBI has stated.
It further submitted that “the case involves around 911 witnesses and 1,671 documents consisting of lakhs of pages relied upon by CBI in all the 11 group cases and are required to be examined by the trial court”.
“Further, most of the witnesses who were in the late 50s and senior citizens at the time of investigation itself are required to depose during the trial. Therefore, any direction to transfer CC No. 8 of 2012 and other groups of Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy to the courts in New Delhi or any other places other than Hyderabad may (cause) unnecessary and avoidable hardship to the witnesses,” stated the CBI, strongly opposing the transfer petition filed by Raju.
According to the CBI, since assuming office as Andhra Pradesh CM in mid-2019, Jagan has attended court only once — on 10 January, 2020 — and used section 317 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) to abstain on all other occasions. The section provides for provision for inquiries and trials being held in absence of the accused in certain cases when the court is satisfied that the personal attendance of the accused is not necessary for the time being.
Jagan claimed exemption from personal appearance in the Hyderabad trial court citing his relocation to Tadepalli, near Vijayawada, about 300 km away from Hyderabad, and his responsibilities of running the state and the difficulties involved in travelling every week to attend court given his position as CM.
After the CBI court dismissed his petition seeking exemption from court appearance in November 2019, Jagan moved the Telangana High Court, which granted him relief from personal appearance in the trial court in August 2022.
The Telangana High Court this year also questioned the delay in trial of the graft cases while hearing a petition of former MP and former YSRCP leader Chegondi Harirama Jogaiah, who sought directions to the CBI to conclude the trial before the 2024 state polls.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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