Dropping charges against Chavan was bad in law: CBI

The Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) on Wednesday accepted that its move of filing an application to drop charges against former chief minister Ashok Chavan in the Adarsh Scam, was ‘bad in law.’ The central agency informed the Bombay High Court that its move was not maintainable.

A division bench of Justice Ranjit More and Justice Sadhana Jadhav heard the petition filed by Chavan challenging the orders of Governor Vidyasagar Rao, who granted the sanction to prosecute him with charges of criminal conspiracy and forgery in the Adarsh Scam case.

Chavan, in his plea has claimed that the sanction against him is nothing but a ‘political vendetta’ since the earlier Governor had refused to give the nod for his prosecution.

During the course of hearing, Justice Jadhav asked, “Since the earlier Governor had rejected your (CBI’s) plea to prosecute him (Chavan), the trial court had gone out of the way and suggested you to review his orders. But then, you refused to review the orders, don’t you think that you answered in haste?”

To this, the CBI counsel Hiten Venegaonkar accepted that the agency’s move was ‘bad in law’ and was ‘not maintainable’ in law.

He said, “When we approached the trial court with our application to withdraw all the charges against Chavan, the court rejected it and termed it bad in law. Similar was the opinion of the HC and now when Chavan challenged this order in the Supreme Court, there we have in our reply accepted that our action was not maintainable and bad in law. We have accepted that the view of the trial court as well as the HC was correct and our stand was incorrect.”

Meanwhile, Justice Jadhav also asked the prosecutors if the ‘fresh material’ (that is the findings of a Judicial Commission as well as the observations of a HC judge) on which they are relying to prosecute Chavan, could be converted as evidence.

Additional solicitor general (ASG) Anil Singh was unable to give a proper answer to this query. However, Venegaonkar later clarified that the ‘fresh material’ need not be converted into as evidence but rather can be considered as a relevant material.

The arguments would continue on Thursday afternoon.