NEW DELHI, Sept 21: A Supreme Court Bench led by the Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Monday said a status report submitted by the Uttar Pradesh government’s Special Investigation Team (SIT) had identified 105 instances of unauthorised currency removal captured on CCTV in the Ram Temple donations misappropriation case.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the UP government, said the probe had been “substantially concluded” and a chargesheet in the case would be filed before the court of the jurisdictional Additional Sessions Judge on or before September 25. The court noted from the report that the role of every person allegedly involved had been assessed.
The 90-day statutory period for investigation, which started with the first arrest in the case, would end on September 25, after which the accused persons would be entitled for default bail, Mr Mehta pointed out.
The status report was perused by the Bench in court. However, the audio was muted and the screen went blank when the order was read out, requiring media personnel to enter the courtroom to grab shreds of the court’s oral dictation of the order.
When senior advocate Ravi Shankar Jandhyala, appearing for petitioner Ajay Kumar Rai, sought a copy of the status report, the Bench said the contents of the documents had been summarised and covered in the judicial order itself. “The State requires to be transparent,” Mr Jandhyala said.
Reading out from the status report, the Bench said the SIT investigation had banked extensively on CCTV footage to identify the accused persons, followed by recoveries, forensic examinations, and audits. After noting that the primary offences included criminal breach of trust, and offences under the Prevention of Corruption Act, the court said the prospect of further investigation to continue under Section 193 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023, would remain open.
Noting that although it did not want to intervene in the jurisdiction of the Sessions Court, the Bench asked the State government to file a copy of the chargesheet in the apex court, too.
The three-member SIT, headed by Lucknow Divisional Commissioner Vijay Vishwas Pant, was constituted by the State government on June 13 at the request of the Trust, before the Supreme Court intervened in the matter. Range Inspector General Kiran S. and Special Secretary (Finance) Neel Ratan Kumar are the other members of the SIT.
The First Information Report named eight people — Avinash Shukla, Anukalp Mishra, Lavkush Mishra, Manish Kumar Yadav, Karunesh Pandey, Ramashankar Mishra, Subhash Srivastava, and Ram Shankar Yadav alias Tinnu — and other unidentified individuals as accused.
(Manas Dasgupta)