THE thing about trouble is that it rarely comes alone. And when it involves two senior Congress members like P.V. Narasimha Rao and Satish Sharma, it would seem only natural that their fortunes follow a similar course. So the logical outcome: if Rao is in the dock, can Sharma be far behind?
The elusive Kaptan sahib of Amethi is caught in an intricate web of investigations launched by the CBI and the Income Tax Department, and is now also in trouble with the Supreme Court. On November 4, it ordered the former petroleum minister to pay up Rs 50 lakh to the Government exchequer as damages for "illegal and arbitrary" allotment of 15 petrol pumps from the ministers discretionary quota. In the process, the apex court also gave the CBI a carte blanche to investigate the allotments within three months and launch criminal proceedings against the former minister with no limits on the CBI probe. All of which is bad news for Sharma. His defence: the discretionary quota has been used earlier by ministers and he was just part of the system.
Sharmas former boss fared slightly better as the festival weekend began. On November 8, a division bench of the Delhi High Court acceded to Narasimha Raos plea for anticipatory bail in the Rs 3.5 crore JMM MPs bribery case and provided interim bail in the St Kitts forgery case. Two days earlier, Judge Ajit Bharioke had granted him bail in the $100,000 Lakhubhai Pathak cheating case.
The bailstorm may have earned Rao a reprieve for the moment after a lower court had rejected his plea in the St Kitts case outright. But with the JMM case coming up before the trial court on November 13, clearly the former prime minister is being dragged from one dock to the other. Sharma has been also chargesheeted in the JMM payoff case. His other bigger petroleum deals are under scrutiny as well. On November 6, a group of CBI sleuths descended upon his farmhouse in Delhithe second raid within a fortnight. According to CBI sources, the raid had been carried out in order to "evaluate and assess" his property and also to check illegal allotments.
In Mumbai, there was more bad news for Sharma. An application filed by a former CBI superintendent of police, Yogesh Pratap Singh, before the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT), has alleged that the former police official was prematurely repatriated to the state cadre as assistant inspector general while he was investigating charges against Reliance Industries. Singh attributes this to an attempt to restrain him from pursuing the Reliance probe.
Singh, who is a 1985-batch Maharashtra cadre officer, was prematurely asked to go back to the state cadre by the then CBI director Vijaya Rama Rao. Singh terms the order void, and says Rao did not have the authority to transfer him. His application claims that Rama Rao took the step "due to considerations which were extraneous in nature". These considerations, says the application, seem to have been prompted by Singhs resolve to "unravel the corruption practised and abetted by powerful corporate entities, particularly Reliance Industries, bureaucrats occupying positions at the apex, and senior politicians including two cabinet ministers Satish Sharma and Jagdish Tytler." According to the former CBI sleuth, intensive investigations had revealed that Reliance "in conspiracy with very senior bureaucrats committed frauds in diverse areas and caused losses to the exchequer exceeding Rs 8,000 crore".
Not unnaturally, Singhs application mentions the handing over of the Mukta-Panna oilfields to Reliance, in which the CBI has already registered a preliminary inquiry. According to Singh, the "handing over of the oilfields to the Reliance-Enron combine has caused a loss to the nation to the tune of a staggering Rs 5,500 crore." Says the application: "When Satish Sharma was the ruling Union minister and at a time when respondent number four (Vijaya Rama Rao) was refraining from acting against him in the JMM case, the applicant (Singh) had clearly pointed out Sharmas involvement and it was precisely there that the applicant had to resubmit the file with the recommendations for registering a case after respondent number four ordered no action into the matter...."
The heat is on for Sharma. This is Singhs second petition in the case. The first filed in April this year had challenged his premature repatriation to the state cadre and comes up for hearing on November 22. Clearly, the situation remains potentially volatile for the former Rajiv Gandhi aide.
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