The CVC has asked the CBI to explore all legal options after the investigating agency informed the anti-corruption watchdog that its probe into the money trail in the 2G spectrum scam had hit a dead-end. The CBI, highly placed government sources said, told the CVC that this was largely on account of lack of co-operation from the Swiss authorities.
Even though the CBI has been able to unearth a major part of the conspiracy behind the spectrum allocation scam it has failed to track the route through which money was sent to various tax havens. And this is precisely what the CVC wanted the CBI to do.
Now that the CBI has virtually expressed its inability to follow the money trail the CVC has directed the CBI to ensure that it exhausts all legal options before reaching any final conclusion. “Its possible that there are some legal provisions or international treaties that may help an investigating agency to extract some information in a criminal case,” a senior CVC official remarked.
The CVC has been asked by the Supreme Court to monitor the multi-agency investigations into the scam and submit regular status reports to the SC. Sources said the anti-corruption watchdog has had several rounds of meeting with agencies like CBI ED and the Financial Intellig-ence Unit. It was in one such meeting that the CBI informed the CVC that its leads into the money trail aspect of the case had dried totally as Swiss authorities were not co-operating with them. Both CBI and ED has written a number of countries even sending out Letter Rogatory seeking information on the money, allegedly paid as kickbacks in the scam, stashed in foreign accounts. “The CBI was of the opinion that till the time the Swiss authorities provide information further investigations into the money trail cannot proceed further since their information is extremely critical,” the official added.