Hyderabad: In a huge relief to three senior IAS officials charged with embezzling public money in the famous Vizag port lands compensation scam,Justice S Govindarajulu of the AP High Court has dropped the criminal cases against them and virtually set them free. The officials who were discharged from the criminal case slapped against them by CBI nearly 13 years ago are M G Gopal,Vijay Kumar and T Gopala Rao.While the first two are still in service,Gopala Rao retired from service six years ago.
Delivering a common judgement,the judge opined that there are no grounds to frame charges against the three officials.The whole case is about paying nearly Rs 14 crore for two pieces of land measuring 33 acres in Kancharapalem area of Visakhapatnam.This land was first taken over by Vizag Port Trust from the land owners in 1972 for the purpose of constructing staff quarters.This possession was shown only on paper. Though the state government declared this land as surplus land and said that no compensation requires to be paid to the land owners,the latter went to the high court and challenged the states decision.The HC struck down the states decision in 1995 saying that the authorities cannot make such a decision after a gap of 14 years of taking over the land even on paper.It was at this stage that the land was freshly acquired by the revenue authorities in 1995 under the provisions of the Land Acquisition Act and the issue settled in a quick way by setting up a negotiations committee and paying compensation.
Following this,a PIL was filed in HC by one Gundu Appala Raju,a resident of Vizag,who charged the authorities with entertaining a middleman called Koganti Krishna Prasad in the negotiations for extraneous reasons.He also charged the authorities with misappropriating the maximum share of the compensation.The then HC chief justice called for separate reports from the then police commissioner of Vizag and the district judge and after persuing their reports,entrusted the matter to CBI.
The CBI found that out of the first instalment compensation of Rs 5.80 crore,an amount of Rs 3.18 crore went into the Karur Vysya Bank account of K Krishna Prasad and charged the authorities with several offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act.Prasad later died in September 2003. Justice Govindarajulu who heard the contentions raised by senior counsel C Padmanabha Reddy for the accused and the CBI counsel P Kesava Rao held that the CBI could not make out a case against the authorities. Moreover,though the Centre has accorded permission to prosecute then district collector M G Gopal and joint collector Vijay Kumar,the state had not granted such a permission saying that it is the policy of the state to settle land acquisition matters in a swift way. Even the entry of Krishna Prasad,the alleged middleman,in the negotiations committee was found valid by the judge because he was holding a sale agreement copy issued to him by the land owners.The CBI could not prove the trail of money from Prasads account into the accounts of anyother public servants.The judge did not agree with the CBIs view that the land rates were unduly hiked by the authorities.
Saying so,the judge discharged the three officials from the case which is currently being heard by the special CBI court in Visakhapatnam.
========================================
Satyameva Jayate link missing in charge sheet
The CBI, which took up Vizag port lands scam and made spectacular progress by securing irrefutable evidence from the government security press in Nasik against the key accused in this scam,surprisingly shied away from recording the same in the charge sheet it filed before court.Koganti Krishna Prasad, accused number six in the case,was a strange entrant into the negotiations committee headed by then district collector M G Gopal.He sat in the meetings of the committee with the help of the sale agreement he entered into with the owners of the land allegedly in the year 1963.This agreement was written on a non judicial stamp paper. Doubting the genuineness of the stamp paper,the CBI sent it to the government security press in Nasik,Maharashtra,for verification.The security press authorities,who were the sole suppliers of such papers to the entire country,concluded that this paper was printed in 1995 and not in 1963 as was claimed by Prasad.
The security press authorities could establish the year of the printing of the stam paper in question by checking for a slogan embossed on the papers for each year. For the year 1995, the solgan was - Satyameva Jayate.It was this slogan that brought the darker side of the story out. By this effort,the CBI could pinpoint the crime angle in the case and had it made this effort a part of the charge sheet,the judge could have seen the story from that angle,legal analysts say.By deliberately deciding to keep this issue in dark,CBI has deliberately led the case to a natural burial,they say.
----------------------------------------------------------------
(source-toi)
No comments:
Post a Comment