NEW DELHI: A day after the Enforcement Directorate’s appeal, the CBI on Tuesday moved the Delhi High Court to challenge the acquittal of former Telecom Minister A Raja and DMK MP Kanimozhi in the 2G scam.The two-member High Court bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C. Hari Shankar admitted the agency’s appeal moved through Additional Solicitor General Tushar Mehta and listed the matter for hearing on Wednesday.
A special CBI court had on December 21 acquitted all the 14 individuals and three entities accused in the 2G spectrum case.Trashing the CBI investigations, the Special 2G court had lambasted the CBI saying “the prosecution failed miserably to prove any charge against any of the accused, made in its well choreographed chargesheet.”
The court also noted that Raja was shown to be the “mother lode of conspiracy in the instant case” but “there is no evidence of his no-holds-barred immersion in any wrongdoing, conspiracy or corruption,” the court noted in the 1,552-page judgement delivered on Thursday.The evidence adduced to substantiate the charges by the prosecution has not been appreciated in its proper perspective by the Special Court and is one of the grounds for the appeal, agency officials said.
The trial court also ignored the fact the case was monitored by the Supreme Court till the filing of the chargesheet and therefore the appeal was moved before the court, added the officials. Besides Raja and Kanimozhi, other accused acquitted in the case include DMK supremo M Karunanidhi’s wife Dayalu Ammal, Shahid Balwa and Vinod Goenka of Swan Telecom Pvt Ltd., Asif Balwa and Rajiv Aggarwal of Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Pvt. Ltd, film producer Karim Morani, and Kalaignar TV’s P Amirtham and Sharad Kumar. In addition, former Telecom Secretary Siddharth Behura, Raja’s erstwhile private secretary RK Chandolia, Unitech Ltd MD Sanjay Chandra and three top executives of Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group -- Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara and Hari Nair -- were also acquitted in the case by the special court.