New Delhi: More than a decade after he was summoned in the Hindalco Coal scam and two years after he died, former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh Wednesday got a clean chit in the case after the Supreme Court accepted the CBI’s decision to close the case against him.
A bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant allowed Singh’s 11-year-old appeal against the trial court’s March 2015 order which summoned him to face trial even as the CBI had filed a closure report in the case involving him and former coal secretary P. C. Parekh.
The CBI court, then led by additional sessions judge Bharat Parashar, who is now the secretary general of the Supreme Court, had issued the summons on 12 March 2015. Parekh too was summoned to appear before the trial court on 8 April, along with Singh, who was the PM and held the coal portfolio.
CBI’s closure report submitted there was no prosecutable evidence against Singh, which the trial court had rejected.
Within a fortnight of the trial court order, Singh approached the Supreme Court, challenging the summon, which was stayed.
On Wednesday, when the CJI-led bench heard a batch case related to the coal scam, Singh’s counsel senior advocate Kapil Sibal informed the court about the former Prime Minister’s appeal pending for its consideration. He requested the bench to dispose of the appeal, in view of Singh’s demise, and observe in the order that the remarks (by the trial court) stand effaced.
“I don’t want these observations to be there,” Sibal urged the bench, which proceeded to hold that there were no compelling reasons for the trial court to reject CBI’s closure report.
“We are satisfied that there were no compelling reasons for the learned sessions judge to turn down the closure reports by the CBI and to take cognisance. Consequently, we allow the SLP and set aside the impugned orders of the learned special judge and as a result thereto accept the closure reports filed by the CBI and close the matter on merits,” the apex court said in its order.
Months after the trial court summoned Singh, the judge presiding over the case had pulled up the CBI in November 2014 for not questioning Singh. A month later, he directed the CBI to record Singh’s statement. The agency was also asked to further investigate the matter.
Soon after the trial court in March 2014 issued summons to Singh and Parakh, the latter had demanded that Singh be quizzed in the matter. He claimed if Singh had persisted, ‘Coalgate’ would not have happened. Singh was finally questioned in January 2015 with the CBI team going to his residence for recording his statement.
The case at hand relates to the allocation of Talabira-II and III coal blocks jointly to Hindalco Industries (an Aditya Birla Group company) and with two other firms in Odisha’s Jharsuguda district in 2005.
CBI had booked Birla (then non-executive chairman of Hindalco), P. C. Parakh (then coal secretary) and other Hindalco officials under various sections, including criminal conspiracy and criminal misconduct on the part of government officials.
When Singh’s appeal was heard by the top court, Sibal, who appeared for him, argued the former Prime Minister had not committed any illegality while allotting coal blocks to Hindalco against the screening committee’s recommendation.
Sibal contended Singh had carried out an administrative decision and that allotment of a mine to a particular company was not illegal because there was no statutory prohibition in doing so. The senior counsel took strong exception to the trial court summons, despite CBI filing two closure reports in the matter.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)