Five corporate honchos lodged in the Tihar jail were denied bail by the Delhi high court on Monday which observed that “the gravity of the offence itself is sufficient to deny bail to the accused.”
Meanwhile, DMK’s Rajya Sabha MP Kanimozhi, who was denied bail for the last four days, through her lawyers, moved the Delhi HC seeking bail on the ground that she was innocent and has nothing to do with the 2G spectrum scam.
The lawyers of Ms Kanimozhi submitted that “she was innocent and the order passed by the judge was wrong.” Ms Kanimozhi, in her petition, submitted that “allegations against her are false and frivolous.”
Justice Ajit Bharihoke is most likely to hear the bail plea on Tuesday.
“She has no role in the alleged criminal conspiracy on allocation of Unified Access Services (UAS) licenses. She, in fact, voluntarily appeared in court and joined the investigation as and when required,” Ms Kanimozi’s lawyer claimed in their submission.
Meanwhile, Delhi HC dismissed bail applications of the five accused corporate honchos, namely Unitech Group MD Sanjay Chandra, D.B. Realty promoter Vinod Goenka, Reliance officials — Hari Nair, Surendra Pipara, and group MD Gautam Doshi.
After hearing the argument in detail from both the sides, Justice Bharihoke, in his 34-page order, said: “Taking into account gravity of accusation against the petitioners a reasonable possibility of their interfering with the process of justice by tampering with the evidence, I do not deem it appropriate to release the petitioners on bail at this stage when further investigation in the matter is going on and the trial is yet to begin.”
Opposing the bail plea of all the five accused, special public prosecutor, U.U. Lalit, submitted that the offence committed by the petitioners are of the highest magnitude resulting in huge loss of almost `30,000 crores to the state exchequer. There is a reasonable apprehensions that if they are freed on bail, they would use their influence to tamper with the witnesses, he submitted before the court.
On the other hand, Mr Goenka claimed in his defence that he had nothing to do with the telecom affairs. The cour said: “From the record, it is evident that there is a deep rooted involvement of the accused of having indulged in corrupt practices running into crores of rupees.”