After a lull of about four months on assessing the progress of the remaining part of investigation in the 2G scam case, especially regarding the foreign transactions, the Supreme Court on Wednesday gave three weeks to the CBI, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department’s investigation wing to submit further status reports.
“What is the present status of investigation? Since the bench (monitoring the case) has not assembled for quite some time due to various reasons... We did not get enough time... It is almost four months now since the last assessment was made,” said a special bench, headed by Justice G.S. Singhvi.
The special bench was reconstituted for the second time after the retirement of Justice A.K. Ganguly who monitored the case with Justice Singhvi since 2010 as Justice A.K. Patnaik brought in place of the superannuating judge recusing form the case last week.
CBI’s special counsel K.K. Venugopal said the progress of investigation has to be processed now through the Central Vigilance Commission as per the court’s last order, it would take two weeks to furnish the reports of the probe agencies to the commission and a further one week would be required to place the same before the bench. Mr Venugopal said the CBI and ED officials had visited some foreign countries where the “letters rogatory” had been sent to take it with the authorities there. Initially the LRs were sent to Isle of Man, Mauritius and some other countries but since the last assessment, six more LRs were issued to some “tax heaven” countries. A report has been prepared by the attorney-general on the responses/informations received form some of the countries, he said. As Justice Radhakrishnan set in the bench for the first time, the top court sought brief statements of facts on investigation done so far.