The CBI and the Enforcement Directorate, in their 2G scam status reports, gave elaborate details about alleged illegalities by former communications minister A. Raja and three other arrested accused to the Supreme Court on Thursday, which termed the scam as big as the Harshad Mehta securities fraud of 1991-92 and urged the government to set up a special court for its trial.
The voluminous investigation reports by the CBI and ED, submitted in sealed covers, were perused by the Supreme Court for over an hour while the judges asked specific questions on certain aspects, including money transactions overseas by several companies which bought 2G licences.
The reports gave elaborate details about transactions in foreign countries by many companies around the time the 2G licences were allocated, and also on the alleged payment of `214 crores by a firm run by Shahid Balwa, recently arrested in Mumbai, to a television channel owned by a powerful political family.
The kind of information unveiled by the two agencies apparently astonished the bench of Justices G.S. Singhvi and A.K. Ganguly, which is monitoring the progress of investigations. The court sought to know from CBI counsel K.K. Venugopal what action the agency planned to take against owners of companies which allegedly appeared to have entered into a criminal conspiracy with those arrested by the agency so far.
While taking on record the report of the Justice Shivraj Patil Committee on the matter, the bench noted: “We are not directing you (CBI)... You must tell us about the criminal conspiracy involving beneficiaries of 2G licences.”
“There is a need for special court on the lines of the 1992 securities scam case. The financial implications in that case were very wide, and the financial implications in this case are also presumed to be very wide,” the bench said, asking attorney-general Goolam E. Vahanvati to convey the government’s stand on a special court by March 1.
“What about the role of beneficiaries of the conspiracy? At page 25 of the CBI report, there is a small figure but it makes a triangle (in a chart). This chart is a small reflection of the web,” the bench pointed to the CBI lawyer, while hinting how large the conspiracy could have been and the possibility of money-laundering on a massive scale.
The court said the report gave the impression that there were people involved who considered themselves a “law unto themselves”, and whose names figured on a “list of billionaires”. The bench then said: “But the beneficiaries are also part of the conspiracy”, and asked for a clear commitment from the CBI counsel on what action would be taken against them.
When Mr Venugopal responded that the court should pass orders if it wanted some specific action taken, the bench refused to oblige, saying that the “investigative agency should have full freedom to act on its own”.
The court noted, going by the CBI report, that the decision of the arrested person (Mr Raja) to exclude the finance and law ministries, as well as the Group of Ministers and the Prime Minister’s Office from the decision-making process in allocating 2G spectrum had virtually “triggered off” the entire sequence of events leading to the scam.
When petitioner counsel Prashant Bhushan sought to know about the inquiry into the role of a corporate lobbyist, the bench, without much elaboration, said “that also has been taken care of” by the agency.
Mr Venugopal mentioned around half-a-dozen foreign transactions, mainly shown as loans for buying spectrum licences, but refrained from mentioning specific amounts in relation to particular companies while reading out the figures.
The CBI’s lawyer said it would take a while to complete investigations on the inflow of money from overseas as this would have to be done through “letters rogatory”, to be sent by Indian courts to the courts in different foreign countries and involved a cumbersome legal exercise.