Trouble seems to be brewing for Delhi’s law Minister Somnath Bharti in a case pertaining to 2006 in which he was indicted to have “tampered with evidence” and tried to influence a witness while representing his client in a graft case.
The case harks back to a bank fraud in which Pawan Kumar, Bharti’s client, was facing charges of corruption and had moved court seeking bail. Bharti was indicted by the Patiala House court in August last year after the CBI accused him and his client Kumar, a suspended employee of State Bank of Mysore, for influencing witness and his senior employee BS Diwakar.
“The petitioner (Kumar) and his counsel (Bharti) tried to influence the witness and also confronted the witness with the tap recording of their conversation with him which is beyond the scope of Section 145 of Evidence Act,” the CBI had submitted before the CBI judge Poonam A Bamba.
The CBI judge had then hauled up Bharti and Kumar and cancelled Kumar’s bail application on the ground that he misused his liberty. “The conduct of accused Pawan Kumar and his advocate (Bharti) is not only highly objectionable, unethical but also amounts to tampering with evidence,” judge Bamba had observed in the order last year.
Kumar, through Bharti had applied for bail in the Patiala House court which was rejected on the ground that they tampered with the evidence and violated the terms of the bail order. later, they challenged the order in the High Court with the help of AAP member and advocate Prashant Bhushan, and were denied any relief this time as well. Similarly, the Supreme Court upheld the High Court’s decision and denied bail to Kumar.
Kumar had told the court that he and his advocate Bharti had a telephonic conversation with Diwakar and claimed that during the talk on phone, Diwakar expressed a different opinion relating to the corruption case than what he testified in court. This conversation was recorded by Kumar and Bharti argued his client should now be permitted to place the audio tapes on record to effectively confront the witness and to bring out the truth.
The High Court, in September 2013, upheld the CBI judge’s order and said that, “It was highly unethical on the part of the petitioner and his counsel to record a conversation and then to place the same on record. The conduct of the petitioner in talking to the prosecution witnesses who was yet to be examined and then to record the conversation was quite deplorable.”