A senior employee of GMR Energy limited was questioned in connection with the corporate espionage case, the Delhi Police officials said on Monday.
The investigations revealed that the company was one of the beneficiaries of the stolen documents from Coal, Power and Petroleum Ministries. The second FIR into the case said that the investigators have recovered the documents related to the coal block allocations and NTPC (National Thermal Power Corporation).
Rajbir Singh, Manager (Corporate Relations) at GMR Energy limited, was called by the Crime Branch of Delhi Police on Sunday. The police team also conducted raids at the office of GMR Energy on Monday.
“GMR employee Rajbir Singh has been called for questioning and we are still in talks with other people. Some are on the run and efforts are on to nab them. Those who ran away are primarily members of consulting companies,” said Police Commissioner BS Bassi.
Bassi also said that the Crime Branch has not yet questioned any CEO of the company but the hunt was on for absconding members of some consultancy firms in this connection.
“We have received information about involvement of some other people from the arrested ones and we have called them for questioning. Some of them are absconding and we are looking for them. Some have been summoned for questioning but we haven’t questioned any CEOs yet,” he said.
He said, “Some documents have been recovered, we are examining them, they are being examined in consultation with respective ministries so that the importance of the documents can be ascertained.”
The documents related to the coal block allocations from the Ministry of Petroleum and classified documents of NTPC from Ministry of Power were also found to be stolen.
So far 16 people have been arrested in this case which continues to throw up new names every day. Police have registered two separate FIRs in this case so far, while 13 people have been arrested in the first FIR, three have been held in the second case.
On February 26, two officials — Jitender Nagpal, PS to Joint Secretary in Forest and Environment Ministry and Vipan Kumar, PA to a UPSC member — were arrested.
The two were arrested after the second FIR in the case which named five people, including lokesh Sharma — an energy consultant for Noida-based Infraline consultancy — who was apprehended on February 24.
Cracking down on a major case of corporate espionage, Delhi Police had on February 19 arrested two junior Oil Ministry officials and three other middlemen for allegedly leaking classified documents to energy companies. On February 20, two energy consultants Santanu Saikia and Prayas Jain and five senior executives from top energy firms — Shailesh Saxena from RIl, Vinay Kumar from Essar, KK Naik from Cairn India, Subhash Chandra from Jubilant Energy and Rishi Anand from ADAG Reliance — were arrested.
Virender Kumar, a casual worker in the Defence Ministry, was arrested on February 24 for allegedly providing forged ID to a key accused in the first FIR.