The Supreme Court on Monday gave the CBI the go-ahead to probe the secret payments made by Aditya Birla Group to Jayanthi Natarajan when she was Environment Minister in the UPA Government. During its coal scam probe, the CBI had recovered a diary from Birla’s official premises in Delhi mentioning about a sum of `7.08 crore having been paid under ‘Project J: Environment and Forests’.
When this fact was disclosed to the court through an application filed by activist lawyer Prashant Bhushan, the SC had sought a response from the CBI. Bhushan alleged that the Project J referred to Jayanthi Natarajan during whose tenure the Birla Group got 13 environmental clearances for its various projects.
The agency found truth in the allegations and submitted a sealed cover report to the SC sharing its findings. The Bench of Justices Madan B lokur, Kurian Joseph and AK Sikri on Monday said, “It appears the CBI has recovered certain documents…It is for the CBI to decide whether an offence is made out, and if an offence is made out even if unrelated to coal block allocation, we expect the CBI to act on the material and take appropriate necessary action in accordance with the law laid down by this court and the provisions of Criminal Procedure Code.”
Bhushan suggested that the dates mentioned in the diary coincided with the period when several coal mining projects of the Birla Group got clearance from the Environment Ministry. In the application filed on behalf of NGO Common Cause, Bhushan demanded a thorough probe by the CBI and the Enforcement Directorate into various hawala transactions revealed in the diary. It 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 Rs 7.08 crore under the heading "Project J - Environment & Forest" along with unaccounted cash of Rs 25 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 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.