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Don’t read it, Chidambaram tells SC on ‘sealed cover’ documents given by ED
The top court had earlier in the day dismissed a petition by Chidambaram that challenged the Delhi High Court order rejecting his pre-arrest bail request against the CBI which arrested him on Wednesday night.
Former finance minister P Chidambaram, who suffered a setback in the Supreme Court in one petition relating to the CBI’s INX Media case against him on Monday, strongly objected to the government’s second most-senior law officer Tushar Mehta handing over documents in ‘sealed cover’ to the top court on the case against Chidambaram.
Senior lawyers Kapil Sibal and Abhishek Singhvi, who appeared for Chidambaram in the Supreme Court, also contested the government’s charge that Chidambaram’s custodial interrogation by the Enforcement Directorate was required to get to the bottom of a bunch of proxy foreign bank accounts that investigators believe are linked to the senior Congress leader.
The top court had earlier in the day dismissed a petition by Chidambaram that challenged the Delhi High Court order rejecting his pre-arrest bail request against the CBI which arrested him on Wednesday night.
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A bench led by Justice R Banumathi ruled that this plea had become ‘infructuous’ since the CBI had already arrested him, and moved on to hear his request for anticipatory bail against the ED. The government has made it clear that the Enforcement Directorate also wanted to arrest and interrogate Chidambaram once the Central Bureau of Investigation, or CBI, was done with its questioning.
The INX Media case relates to alleged irregularities in Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) clearance given to the media group for foreign investment to the tune of Rs 305 crore in 2007, when Chidambaram was finance minister.
CBI registered a first information report on May 15, 2017, alleging irregularities in the manner the clearance had been awarded. The Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed a money laundering case a year later.
Kapil Sibal argued that the ED had all the time it needed to summon P Chidambaram for questioning all this while. The senior lawyer asked the court to enquire from the ED when it discovered the allegations that it had listed in its affidavit. The ED, he said, had never questioned Chidambaram about any allegation that it was now levelling against him. During his questioning by the CBI too, Sibal said the 73-year-old Rajya Sabha member had been asked basic questions including one about his Twitter account.
He also contested the documents handed over to the bench by the Solicitor General Tushar Mehta’s in a ‘sealed cover’, underscoring that this was entirely inconsistent to Chidambaram’s fundamental rights. “The procedure followed to submit documents in court must pass the test of reasonableness,” he said.
The bench, which had earlier indicated that it would go through the documents during lunch break, later agreed not to go through them at this stage in view of Kapil Sibal’s objections.
