The plot thickens
THE sequence of events in October leading to the upheavals in the CBI involves issues ranging from corruption and hawala transactions to political patronage and cover-up. A high point in this course of events was when a CBI team conducted raids within its own headquarters and arrested Deputy Superintendent of Police Devinder Kumar in connection with bribery allegations involving CBI Special Director Rakesh Asthana.
Following this, in a midnight drama in which the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) apparently called the shots directly, major changes were made in the CBI and the top officers of the agency were sent on leave. This midnight action of October 24 was apparently preceded by a meeting between Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) president Amit Shah and National Security Adviser Ajit Doval at the Prime Minister’s house. Shortly after midnight, the police cordoned off the CBI headquarters. The leave order was issued at 1.45 a.m., and around 2 a.m., the police escorted CBI Joint Director M. Nageshwar Rao to the CBI headquarters and he took over as interim CBI Director. The first thing he did was to remove officials who were investigating a case involving Asthana. Rao is the first Inspector General-level official ever to be chief of the CBI.
At 7 a.m., the offices of Alok Verma, CBI Director, and Asthana were sealed and both were stopped from entering the building and their drivers were withdrawn. They were sent on leave by the Central Vigilance Commission and the Central government and were informed of their leave only in the morning. A team of officers working under Asthana was shunted out. Officer A.K. Bassi, who was looking into the bribery charges against Asthana, was transferred to Port Blair.
Asthana is reportedly close to both Narendra Modi and Amit Shah. He headed the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Gujarat Police that probed the 2002 Sabarmati Express fire and the 2008 serial blasts of Gujarat. He arrested Lalu Prasad in 1996 in the fodder scam case and won the praise of the BJP, then in the opposition. As soon as the NDA came to power in 2014, he was brought to New Delhi and posted in the CBI. He was reportedly hand-picked by the PMO to head the CBI for a few months in 2016-17 when there was a delay in appointing a full-time Director. It was only when the Congress objected to it that a fresh panel of officers was created from senior batches and Alok Verma was appointed. But Verma is set to retire in 2019 and Asthana was being considered as the man Modi would like to install in his place.
At the core of the conflict within the CBI is the meat exporter Moin Akhtar Qureshi’s case. Qureshi has been accused of tax evasion, hawala transactions and acting as a conduit between some CBI officers and a few high-profile people accused in some cases. On October 15, Hyderabadbased businessman Sathish Babu Sana filed a first information report (FIR) against Asthana, CBI Information Officer Devinder Kumar, and Somesh Prasad and Manoj Prasad, sons of a former director of the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), that they had harassed him and demanded a bribe of Rs.5 crore. Sana was a witness in one of the cases pertaining to Qureshi. According to his complaint, he was frequently sent notices and summoned to the CBI office in Delhi by Kumar. In every meeting, he was repeatedly asked about his relationship with Qureshi.
Sana had invested Rs.50 lakh in Qureshi’s company, Great Height Infra, and had apparently produced his income tax returns regarding the same. But Kumar apparently told him that he had made a payment of Rs.50 lakh to Qureshi in another case, which he repeatedly denied. This continued through Octobernovember 2017. According to him, to get relief from frequent harassment and “mental agony” and to be exonerated in the case, Sana agreed to pay up to Rs.5 crore through the Prasad brothers in Dubai to the CBI as bribe in tranches. He made a part payment of Rs.2.95 crore in December 2017, but the notices and summons continued. On September 24, 2018, when Sana was going abroad, the immigration office stopped him at Hyderabad. Subsequently, Kumar called him on October 1 and 3. Apparently faced with continuous harassment, he recorded his statement with the Magistrate Court regarding the entire matter. He claimed he had again paid Rs.36 lakh in October to get relief from further appearance. Manoj was caught on October 16 when he came to India from Dubai to allegedly receive Rs.1.75 crore, the last tranche of the bribe.
On October 22, the CBI released a statement with the above-mentioned facts to clear the air of misinformation around the case. On the basis of Sana’s allegation, Verma launched an investigation against Asthana. Asthana, in turn, launched an inquiry into the bribery