The Supreme Court on Friday took a serious view of the threat to an IIT professor for urging Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to ensure that Enforcement Directorate (ED) chief A.K. Mathur is not associated with the probe into the black money stashed away by Indians in tax havens abroad.
An apex court bench of Justice B. Sudarshan Reddy and justice S.S. Nijjar said: "What has been stated is very serious. We are concerned about it. These things cannot be allowed when the hearing of the matter is going on." The court directed Delhi police commissioner B.K. Gupta to file an affidavit stating what action he has taken on the complaint by Professor S.K. Dubey and if an FIR has been lodged on the basis of an e-mail sent by him.
He stated in the e-mail that an ED official had warned him that the police and the intelligence bureau would go after him if he did not withdraw his name from the letter to the Prime Minister. Dubey, who is the director of the Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur, is one of the several eminent people who have written to the Prime Minister to keep the ED officials away from the investigations into black money stashed away abroad.
The court asked the central government to state its position disclosing names of the people involved in stashing away black money and also for setting up a special investigating team (SIT) for conducting a probe.