Court directs police to supply complete documents to accused

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Court directs police to supply complete documents to accused
Court directs police to supply complete documents to accused

A Delhi court today directed the police to supply deficient documents and compact discs to 13 accused chargesheeted in the Petroleum Ministry documents leak case, including five corporate executives.

Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM) Sumit Dass asked the investigating officer of the case by when would the forensic laboratory (FSL) reports be received.

The court asked the prosecuting agency to expeditiously file the FSL report and start arguments on the point of framing of charges against the accused and posted the matter for August 6 for further proceedings.

During the hearing, the defence counsel submitted that they have not received the complete set of documents annexed with the charge sheet and sought the deficient copies.

The court had earlier also directed the Crime Branch of Delhi Police to supply copies of deficient documents to the accused and complete the process of scrutiny of documents.

Police has chargesheeted 13 accused in the case including five corporate executives — Shailesh Saxena from Reliance Industries Ltd, Vinay Kumar from Essar, K K Naik from Cairns India, Subhash Chandra from Jubilant Energy and Rishi Anand from Reliance ADAG.

The other accused are multi-tasking staff of Petroleum Ministry, Ishwar Singh and Asharam, former staffers of the ministry Lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar, Defence Ministry employee Virender Kumar, private person Rajkumar Chaubey, energy consultant Prayas Jain and journalist Shantanu Saikia.

All the 13 accused are currently out on bail.

Earlier, the Petroleum Ministry had informed the court that eight documents allegedly recovered from the accused during the probe were classified in nature and none of them were in public domain.

The accused have been chargesheeted for alleged offences under various sections of IPC including 457 (trespass), 380 (theft), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine forged documents) read with 120-B (criminal conspiracy).

On February 20 last year, police had arrested the five corporate executives alleging they used to procure classified documents from Lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar and pay them. The documents were then supplied to the firms by these officials for their benefit, the police had alleged.

Police had also arrested Jain, Saikia, Singh, Asharam and Chaubey for allegedly conspiring to procure sensitive documents from different ministries including Petroleum and Natural Gas. A total of 16 persons were arrested in connection with two separate FIRs lodged by the police.

( Source – PTI )

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