On a day when former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was summoned as an accused in the Hindalco coal block allocation case, trouble mounted further for the erstwhile UPA Government with a fresh application in Supreme Court (SC) demanding a probe into entries in a secret diary recovered from the Aditya Birla Group-owned Hindalco Industries with details of payments made to Government functionaries.
Incidentally, the dates mentioned in the diary coincide with the period when several coal mining projects of the Birla Group got clearance from the Environment Ministry, alleged the application by NGO Common Cause. The application filed by advocate Prashant Bhushan is likely to be taken up on March 16 when the special Bench monitoring the coal block allocation scam will hold a sitting.
Demanding a thorough probe by the CBI and Enforcement Directorate into the various hawala transactions revealed in the diary, the application said, “It is evident that the central issue in this affair is that of criminality and acts of corruption on part of the decision makers and beneficiaries of the allocation in question and it would not be sufficient to investigate it from the angle of Income-Tax evasion.”
The application alleged that among the various things seized by the CBI during a raid on Birla’s corporate office in Delhi on October 15, 2013, was a diary that revealed payment of Rs7.08 crore under the heading “Project J — Environment & Forest” along with unaccounted cash of Rs25 crore and some incriminating documents.
The payment was made during the period January 9, 2012 to February 2, 2012. The application went on to state, “During Jayanthi Natarajan’s tenure as Minister, Environment and Forests, as many as 13 projects of the Aditya Birla Group companies were cleared between November 8, 2011 and June 17, 2013.” It was during this period that Hindalco got clearance from the said Ministry to double its extraction of coal from the Talabira coal blocks, which is under CBI investigation.
The CBI had shared details about the diary and other material with the Income-Tax authorities, who subsequently, prepared a detailed appraisal report on hawala transactions. But the application stated that during investigations, a top official of the Birla group admitted that huge transactions of cash were routed through hawala by the company which required a detailed probe by CBI or ED.
With the matter pending before the trial judge hearing the coal block allocation scam, it remains to be seen whether the apex court will direct the CBI to probe into the hawala transactions as well. With former PM Manmohan Singh already in the loop, this could cause further embarrassment to him and to the erstwhile UPA Government under him.