Increasingly under pressure from the bureaucracy to turn down the CBI request to sanction prosecution against two bureaucrats in the Emaar case, Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy will have to take a crucial decision.
While the CM was suggested the option of leaving it to the Centre to take a decision on sanction of prosecution, the officials fear that the CBI would obtain sanction from the Centre in such event. They wanted the CM to say a firm “no” to the request. The legal precedent clearly shows that the officers — B.P. Acharya and L.V. Subrahmanyam — may even wriggle themselves out of the probe if the state government denied sanction of prosecution.
The High Court, in a previous case in August, 2010, struck down a CBI probe against bureaucrats M.G. Gopal and Vijay Kumar and cited lack of sanction of prosecution by the state government as one of the reasons. The CBI framed charges of corruption against Mr Gopal and Mr Vijay Kumar in a land acquisition case when they were Visakhapa-tnam district collector and joint collector respectively.
The CBI linked quick settlement of compensation to corruption but the then CM N. Chandrababu Naidu denied sanction of prosecution, taking a stand that settling land acquisition cases quickly was a policy matter of the government. The Centre, however, went ahead with sanction of prosecution and the CBI filed a chargesheet but the HC dropped criminal cases against the officials. Section 197 CrPC also clearly says that the sanction of prosecution should be given by the state government if the public servant facing the allegations works under it.