New Delhi, April 22: Witnesses turning hostile are nothing new, but a “dead” witness wishing to be examined?
The urea scam, which hit the headlines in 1996, threw up such a surprise recently when a judge received a fax from Vorobiev Michail Setrovich of Russia, saying he wished to be examined.
To the CBI’s disbelief, it was found that Setrovich had died in 1998.
The Rs 133-crore scam broke in 1996 after some senior officers of National Fertilisers Limited were found to have connived with foreigners and gobbled up $38 million. The money was meant for the supply of 2,00,000 metric tonnes of urea to NFL. NFL paid the amount, but no urea came.
NFL had chosen three companies — Amartek International (American), Inter-state International (Danish) and Bulsigma Limited (Bulgarian) — for the supply of urea in 1995. Employees of the companies were arrested in Switzerland in 1997 and extradited to India in 1999.
Delhi High Court took five years to record the prosecution’s evidence. But when it was through in 2004, the defence said it wished to examine seven witnesses from abroad. One of them was Setrovich, an employee of a Russian company called Salvet.
Officials are clueless about how the fax, supposedly from Russia, came straight to the judge. The source from where it originated is being probed.
The CBI believes this could be a tactic by the defence to delay proceedings so that the accused get time to withdraw money from Swiss banks.
If that is the case, they seem to have succeeded in part.
A Swiss court, which had frozen the bank accounts where $34 million was parked, has defreezed them recently. This was done as the trial in India was taking a long time. Also, of the seven persons the defence wanted to examine, six have dropped out, sources said.
The CBI had filed chargesheets against nine persons — C.K. Ramakrishnan and D.S. Kanwar (NFL executives), Sambasivan Rao (agent), Tuncay Alankus and Cihan Karanchi (executives of Turkish firm Karsan Ltd), Sanjiva Rao (brother-in-law of Narasimha Rao’s son), P.C. Yadav (son of a former Union minister), D.M. Gaud (agent) and E. Pinto (a Brazilian).
Sambasivan Rao is the main accused in the case.
