Not guilty

Those licences stay cancelled. The Supreme Court’s move paved the way for the auctioning of spectrum, and also resulted in a consolidation in the telecom business.

Thursday’s judgement by the special court says there is no evidence of any criminality by any of the accused.

Reading out the verdict, Saini said, “I have absolutely no hesitation in holding that the prosecution has miserably failed to prove any charge against any of the accused, made in its well choreographed charge sheet.”

“There is no evidence on the record produced before the Court indicating any criminality in the acts allegedly committed by the accused persons relating to fixation of cut¬off date, manipulation of first¬come first¬served policy, allocation of spectrum to dual technology applicants, ignoring ineligibility of STPL and Unitech group companies, non¬revision of entry fee and transfer of Rs. 200 crore to Kalaignar TV (P) Limited as illegal gratification,” the court said in its verdict.

The court said there was no evidence to show Raja was the “mother lode of conspiracy” in the case, nor that he misled Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

“Vested interests manipulated public perception... It has been repeatedly proven that the pre- sumptive loss to the exchequer which formed the basis for the conspiracy theorists to run amok, was cooked-up,” Raja said in a statement after the verdict.

Criticising the investigation by CBI , Saini recorded “there was no expeditious investigation in this case. After registration of the case, for more than a year, almost nothing was done in the case and then suddenly all the witnesses were recorded one after the another as if the investigators had all of a sudden gained all the knowledge of the case and the witnesses had also become source of all the information. This puts a question mark on the truthfulness of the prosecution case and lends credence to the theory of pressure on the witnesses.”

Sources in the ED said the agency plans to appeal the case in high court.