New Delhi: In its judgment giving a clean chit to former senior civil servants of the coal ministry, the trial court flagged some “strange” trends it has noticed with regard to probes conducted by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in the multiple cases linked to the alleged coal block allocation scam.
Additional sessions judge Sanjay Bansal questioned the CBI’s selective approach in considering the evidence, questioning it for taking two views on the minutes prepared during the three screening committee meetings that recommended allocation of coal blocks to applicant companies.
The 34th, 35th and 36th screening committee meetings were held between September and October 2006, and all allocations cleared by them came under CBI’s scanner following a Supreme Court judgment that cancelled the mining leases on the ground that they did not comply with the guidelines at the time.
In some cases, where the CBI also named public servants as accused and invoked charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act, the CBI claimed that the minutes were recorded wrongly. However, in other cases, where only private companies were accused of cheating, it said otherwise.
Talking about it towards the end of his 100-page judgement, ASJ Bansal called the CBI’s approach “completely inacceptable”.
Similarly, the court also flagged non-scrutiny/non-checking of applications as a major lapse on the part of the accused in cases where public servants are named and companies have failed to provide complete information about their assets.
However, where only private companies are being prosecuted, CBI has remained silent about this alleged lapse only because, according to the agency in court, the companies had submitted complete details about themselves.
ASJ Bansal was dealing with the case related to the allocation of a coal block to M/s Kohinoor Steel Private Limited (M/s KSPL) in Jharkhand’s Medinirai Coal Block. He discharged former coal secretary H.C. Gupta and joint secretary K.S. Kropha, who, he held, had committed no offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
As head of the 34th Screening Committee, which cleared M/s KSPL’s application for allotment of the coal block, Gupta faced multiple charges, with one of them being non-scrutiny/non-checking of the applications in the said case.
Terming them as administrative lapses, the judge said these cannot be equated with criminal liability. Also, improper execution of a public duty is an offence under the anti-corruption law if it is done for a reward, which was missing in the present case.
“A very strange trend has been noticed by this Court. It is apparent that non-scrutiny/non-checking of the applications has been highlighted as a major lapse on the part of accused public servants in cases in which the public servants have been chargesheeted like the present case (M/s KSPL),” the judge observed.
Referring to another case, where private company M/s SKS Ispat and Power Limited is the sole accused, the judge said non-scrutiny or non-verification of applications was completely ignored. And, this aspect, he said, is present in all cases where only private parties are facing the charges.
This variance, the court said, is even though the two cases related to allocation of coal blocks were cleared together in the 34th screening committee meeting held on 22 September 2006. Both M/s KSPL and M/s SKS were applicants for the sponge iron plant and the administrative ministry for the two was the Ministry of Steel.
In both cases, the judge noted, CBI referred to the same office note. However, in the case of M/s SKS Ispat, nothing adverse is stated against the accused public servants. Rather, the agency has accused the private company of inducing the same public servants —Gupta and Kropha—who were chargesheeted in the M/s KSPL case.
When asked to explain, CBI said that because it had found the documents annexed with M/s KSPL’s application were incomplete, whereas in the case of M/s SKS Ispat, the documents were found to be complete.
However, unconvinced, the court observed: “Non-scrutiny/non-checking of applications was common to both the cases, but the CBI adopted a selective approach. This was only because the documents and the application in one case were found incomplete, while in the other, they were found to be complete.”
It further added: “The same minutes of meeting are referred to as wrongly recorded in one case i.e. the present case (of M/s KSPL) whereas the same minutes are relied upon to show consideration of information supplied by the applicant company in the other case i.e. case of SKS Ispat. This is completely unacceptable.”
ASJ Bansal opined that either non-scrutiny/non-checking of the application should have been taken adversely in both types of cases or ignored completely.
“The fate of accused public servants cannot hinge upon per chance discovery of completeness or incompleteness of documents filed with the application,” the court said, adding he has come across this variance in cases emerging from the 35th and 36th Screening Committee meetings as well.
(Edited by Sanya Mathur)
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