Face trial: Top court to Dayanidhi Maran

NEW DELHI: Dismissing an appeal filed by former telecom minister Dayanidhi Maran and his brother Kalanithi Maran, who owns the Sun Group, the Supreme Court of India on Monday directed them to stand trial for running an illegal BSNL telephone exchange from their house in Chennai between 2004-06.

The Maran brothers had challenged a recent Madras high court judgment that had set aside their discharge by a special CBI court in the case and ordered them to face trial.

“All these matters will be decided in trial. Go and face trial,” a bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi, Navin Sinha and T Banumathi told senior advocate A M Singhvi who appeared for Maran.

A special CBI had court in March 2018 discharged Dayanidhi, his brother Kalanithi, and five other accused in the illegal telephone exchange case.

In June, the CBI challenged the clean chit in the Madras high court, which later held there was sufficient material to prosecute them and directed the CBI to file charges within 12 weeks and conclude the trial within 12 months.

The CBI’S allegation against the Marans was that an illegal private telephone exchange was set up at Dayanidhi’s Chennai residence when he was the telecom minister, and that this exchange was used for business transactions involving the Sun Network. The CBI had alleged that Dayanidhi caused a loss of ~1.78 crore to the exchequer.