Coal scam: Probe against CBI ex-chief to start as SC okays panel
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Monday gave shape to a high-level team to probe whether former CBI director Ranjit Sinha’s alleged meetings with certain coal block allocation scam accused at his official residence last year led to dilution of charge-sheets against them.
The surfacing of the visitors’ diary and its submission by NGO Common Cause’s advocate Prashant Bhushan last year to the SC, which was monitoring investigations into the coal scam, had convinced the court to institute an inquiry headed by former CBI special director M L Sharma.
A bench comprising Justices Madan B Lokur, Kurian Joseph and A K Sikri approved the team selected by Sharma. It included three retired IPS officers – former Narcotics Control Bureau DG B B Mishra and two former senior superintendents of police in CBI Bhupinder Kumar and M C Joshi. Head constable in CBI’s economic offences wing in Mumbai Bhagat Singh will also be part of the inquiry team.
Attorney general Mukul Rohatgi said the court could fix the remuneration of the inquiry panel members. But the bench said it would like to get the panel’s assessment of the workload before fixing remuneration. The panel will give a report to the court on this on November 16.
The court also asked the CBI and the government to provide all relevant documents to the inquiry panel. Bhushan requested the court to empower the panel with summoning powers to ease their task of seeking presence of any person connected to the inquiry.
But the AG said since it was an SC-appointed inquiry panel, it would have inherent powers to summon persons it wanted to question and anyone not responding to such summons would be construed to be violating the apex court’s orders.
Sinha’s counsel Vikas Singh said his client should not be condemned before hearing his version. He said Sinha had rubbished the diary entries. But the bench said Sinha had a right to appear before the panel and put forth his version of the diary controversy.
The SC had on May 14 held that an inquiry was required into the diary episode. It had said, “A view was taken that Sinha should be directed not to interfere in the investigations in that case and that, coupled with his meeting accused persons in the coal block allocation case without the investigating officer being present, is enough to persuade us that some further inquiry is necessary to ensure that the investigations have been fair in the coal block allocation cases where Sinha has had one or more meetings with one or more accused persons.
“Since we have held that it was completely inappropriate for Ranjit Sinha to have met persons accused in the coal block allocation case without the investigating officer being present or without the investigating team being present, it is necessary to look into the question whether any one or more such meetings of Sinha with accused persons without the investigating officer have had any impact on the investigations and subsequent charge sheets or closure reports filed by the CBI.”
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