Delhi, November: DMK MP Kanimozhi will appeal in the High Court today for bail in the 2G scam case. Yesterday, a CBI court in Delhi had dismissed her bail plea along with that of seven other accused.
The court’s decision stunned many as the odds were in favour of her getting bail after more than five months in prison for her alleged role in the telecom scam.
The CBI, which had contested three earlier bail applications for her, had said a few weeks ago that this time around, it has no objections to her leaving prison.
The optimism allowed by those factors could be why the young MP, who has shown a preternatural calm during her hundreds of appearances in court over the last few months, broke down when Judge OP Saini announced that he was refusing bail to her and seven others. In his order, the judge who is handling the trial for the telecom scam was scathing of Kanimozhi’s lawyers for trying to use her gender as grounds for her bail. “Accused Kanimozhi belongs to upper echelons of the society and is also a Member of Parliament,” he said. “By no stretch of imagination Kanimozhi can be said to be suffering from any discrimination on the grounds of being a woman.”
Senior leaders from her party, the DMK, were visibly shocked when they heard the verdict. TR Baalu and TKS Elangovan were seen holding her. In Chennai, her father, M Karunanidhi, who heads the DMK, said he was upset with today’s development but that his alliance with the Congress remains intact, and the DMK will not pull out of the UPA coalition at the Centre.
Kanimozhi has been in jail since May 20 for the telecom swindle, estimated to be India’s largest scam. The CBI has said in court that it cost the country Rs. 30,000 crore. The government’s auditor places the price tag at Rs. 1.76 lakh crore. (Read: What is 2G scam?)
Along with Kanimozhi, those who were denied bail today are Bollywood filmmaker Karim Morani, Kusegaon Fruits & Vegetables directors Rajiv Aggarwal and Asif Balwa, Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Balwa, former bureaucrats RK Chandolia and Siddharth Behura, and Sharath Kumar who is the Managing Director of Kalaignar TV, which he co-owns with Kanimozhi and her stepmother.
Her lawyers have argued in court that she served only briefly as a Director of Kalaignar TV; and that the money from Swan was in any case a loan that was returned to Swan with interest, and that since the CBI has collected all relevant documents and no witness has testified against her, she can neither tamper with evidence nor try to influence testimony. In court, however, the CBI has described Kanimozhi as “the active brain” behind Kalaignar TV.
The trial for the telecom scam begins on November 11 for the 14 people, who have all been accused of criminal conspiracy. A Raja, also from the DMK and also in jail, is the only one who has not applied for bail – he says he will leave jail only after he proves in court that the scam he is being held accountable for is fictitious.
The CBI says that in 2008, Mr Raja misused his office as Telecom Minister, to twist official policy and rules in who was entitled to mobile network licenses and spectrum, and at what price. He allegedly showed undue favour to three companies – Swan, Unitech Wireless, and Reliance Telecom. Their senior-most executives are in prison. A series of calculations by different experts and departments find that the telecom scam is India’s greatest swindle. The CBI has estimated the losses caused to the country to be in the range of Rs. 30,000 crore.