With the recovery of documents pertaining to Power and Coal Ministries and the arrest of seven more people in connection with Petroleum & Natural Gas Ministry’s document theft case, the Delhi Police on Friday widened the probe. With this, the total number of arrests has increased to 12. Sources said that investigators also recovered the photocopies of input material on National Gas Grid for inclusion in Finance Minister’s Budget Speech of 2015-16.
The police on Friday arrested Prayas Jain and Shantanu Saikia in this connection. Jain and Saikia are energy consultants who were found to have received stolen documents. Saikia is a former journalist who runs a web portal on petroleum while Jain is the chief executive officer of Metis India, a subsidiary of a Melbourne (Australia)-based company.
Meanwhile, the police on Friday night arrested RIl’s corporate affairsmanager Shailesh Saxena, Essar’s DGM Vinay Kumar, Cairns India DGM KK Naik, senior executive of Jubiliant Energy Subhash Chandra and Reliance ADAG DGM Rishi Anand.
According to a senior official, at least 55 people including officials from Essar and Reliance Industries limited (RIl), were questioned till Friday evening. A senior journalist, now employed with a corporate house, was also grilled for hours. A CEO of a Dubai-based company that deals in petrol and coal was also questioned.
Delhi Police chief BS Bassi said that Saikia and Jain, both ran some sort of an independent website where they uploaded the analysis of the photocopied confidential documents.
“And this information was further used by corporate houses. They also shared this information with some individuals in return of money,” Bassi said in response to a question. Bassi, however, refused to reveal the names of the organisations that benefitted from this. “It will not be good to reveal the names of these organisations as the investigation is still on.”
Meanwhile, Crime Branch sleuths took Asharam (58) and Ishwar Singh (56), two multi-tasking staffers in the Ministry, along with three of their alleged accomplices to the room numbers 201 and 207 of the Ministry to recreate the sequence of events. Investigators found that the accused had accessed the rooms of Joint Secretary (Exploration) and Joint Secretary (Refineries) in the middle of the night to steal confidential documents from these key offices of the Petroleum Ministry. Police allegedly recovered a bunch of keys used to access the rooms of top Ministry officials from the accused.
They had also stolen papers from the office of the Special Secretary, two Joint Secretaries and some directors dealing with sensitive issues like exploration policy, petroleum pricing and gas pricing, sources said.
The Pioneer is in possession of the copy of the FIR, which states, “the papers of petroleum planning and analysis cell (monthly gas report December 2014), photocopies of exploration division ONGC, which was signed by Department Secretary Nalin Srivastava and various documents signed by Nipendra Mishra, the Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, were recovered from their possession”.
Investigators have also recovered the photocopies of input material on National Gas Grid for inclusion in Finance Minister’s Budget Speech of 2015-16, said the FIR. Police said that they were planning to slap another Section of the Official Secret Act on the accused. Sources told The Pioneer that if the documents were related to the policy decisions they would definitely add Section of Official Secrets Act into the FIR.
Meanwhile, over a dozen teams of the Crime Branch conducted raids on the offices and houses of the accused persons. Bundles of documents related to several other Ministries, including coal and petrol, were recovered during the raids.
Crime Branch officials said the activity of procuring the documents from the Ministries were on for the past several months.
Sources told The Pioneer that lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar, who were arrested on Thursday, were working on payroll of Rs40,000 per month under Prayas Jain. Jain used to give them the extra money whenever they procured confidential documents from the Ministry. Shantanu Saikia would also give money amount to Rs 20,000 for the every bundle of documents. The leaks were allegedly happening for the past several months under the very nose of the Ministry and security agencies. Crime Branch was alerted by the central security agencies that some important information related with the Ministries like Petrol and Coal were being passed to several Indian firms.