CBI moves Delhi high court against acquittals in 2G case
NEWDELHI: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday moved the Delhi high court challenging the acquittal of former Union minister A Raja, DMK MP Kanimozhi and others in connection with the 2G Spectrum case, contending that the judge had “ignored reliable evidences and accepted the uncorroborated evidence of the accused Raja and RK Chandolia as gospel truth”.
The CBI’S plea comes a day after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) moved the Delhi HC challenging the acquittal of all the accused in a money laundering case related to the case. The plea was mentioned before the Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal by ASG Tushar Mehta and is likely to be taken up for hearing on March 21.
The plea claimed that the judge completely overlooked material evidence in the case which involves alleged preferential allotment of licences and spectrum to telcos in 2008 when Raja was the telecom minister in the then Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government.
A subsequent report by the comptroller and auditor general claimed that irregularities in the allotment had caused the central government notional losses of ~1.76 lakh crore. In 2012, the Supreme Court cancelled all 122 licences alloted by Raja.
The CBI, while filing its chargesheet, had revised the loss to ~30,984 crore to the exchequer in allocation of spectrum licences.
The material evidence cited by CBI includes not adhering to a cut-off date for the first come first served policy; the ineligibility of one of the telcos that received licences, Swan Telecom; and Raja’s relationships with some of the accused from the telcos involved.
The petition also said that the trial court judge had based his conclusions on conjectures and on self-serving statement made by the accused. .
The plea, which is more than a thousand pages long, also attacked the judge for “inconsistencies in his own observations, which he has failed to notice”.
On December 21, 2017 Special Judge OP Saini had acquitted Raja, Kanimozhi and 15 others, including former telecom secretary Siddharth Behura, Raja’s erstwhile private secretary RK Chandolia, Swan Telecom promoters Shahid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka, Unitech Ltd MD Sanjay Chandra and three top executives of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group — Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara and Hari Nair — in the CBI’S 2G case.