The Jharkhand High Court on Friday reserved its order on former Bihar Chief Minister lalu Prasad's plea to transfer one of his cases in the fodder scam to another court from the present court of Pravas Kumar Singh.
After hearing the spirited arguments of lalu's lawyer Ram Jethmalani, a single bench of Justice RR Prasad fixed July 1 to pronounce the order.
The RJD chief had filed a petition before the High Court seeking transfer of RC-20A-96 case to another special court as he did not expect justice from the present special CBI judge Pravas Kumar Singh as he was allegedly a relative of Janata Dal (U) leader and a Minister in the Nitish Kumar's Cabinet PK Shahi. The special court is scheduled to deliver the verdict on July 15 in the case relating to the alleged fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 37.7 crore from the Chaibasa treasury in the 1990s.
Earlier, Jethmalani argued that lalu has reasonable apprehension that he may not get justice from the present designated CBI court.
He divided his contention in two parts —- first, the judge on the trial, and second the Judge's close relationship with the petitioner's counsel PK Shahi who had appeared sometime back in the Supreme Court. He preferred to mention the second part first. "The CBI Judge PK Singh and Shahi have close social and political relationship with each other. Shahi was defeated by RJD's Prabhunath Singh with a margin of more than 1.5 lakh votes in Maharajganj lok Sabha seat. This indicates that they are politically related," argued Jethmalani.
"On the other hand, since the petitioner's counsel and JD (U) leader PK Shahi is the first cousin of the CBI judge Singh's wife, he is also related socially with Shahi," he added. "Genealogical chart as well as the relevant photographs, depicting their social and political relationship has also been attached with the petition," he said.
Jethmalani alleged that the court seems to be in a hurry to come to conclusion and finish the case. "The prosecution took 12 years to come to conclusion but wants the defense to conclude within a week's time. It produced as many as 350 witnesses before the court but the list of 79 witnesses produced by the defense was curtailed to nine only. When we moved to the High Court against this, we were allowed to produce only 15 more witnesses from our side to be examined," alleged Jethmalani.
"The CBI is in haste and I am intelligent enough to conclude that the learned judge has kept his Judgment ready," he added.When the court asked as how much time actually they want to be given for defense, Jethmalani said at least 35 days would have been given in this regard.Opposing Prasad's counsel, CBI lawyer Mokhtar Khan said that fair opportunities were given to him and the list of witnesses was given to him in advance. "He has been given all opportunities to present his case. At the fag end, he has been raising this point which was never raised earlier," said Khan.
"Several dates were fixed in the court, but no one appeared from Prasad's side while the court sat idle for hours," added the CBI advocate.Out of 54 accused in RC20A/96 all the other accused have completed their arguments except Prasad, who has moved to the High Court for trivial issues.The court also reserved its verdict in yet another petition filed by Prasad against the CBI court for not allowing the former Vigilance SP Bimlesh Prasad Sinha examined by the defense. Sinha happened to be the investigating office in the case. The court kept its orders reserved for July 1.