Explain the allocations, apex court tells Centre

The Centre suffered a major jolt on Friday as the Supreme Court issued notice to it on a law suit that alleged severe omissions and commissions in coal block allocations.

Giving an impetus to the functioning of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), the court observed that it is a constitutional body whose findings have to be considered.

The court rejected solicitor general RF Nariman’s plea that the CAG report on coal block allocations is not open for judicial review as Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee was examining it.
Since CAG is a constitutional body, its report can be the basis of an investigation into allegations of plundering national resources for the benefit of some companies, the court ruled.

The role of PAC is different and “we are not interfering with that”, the court said.

Giving the central government two months to respond to a writ petition by lawyer ML Sharma seeking the scrapping of all the 194 coal blocks, the judges asked: “Is it a coincidence that relatives of politicians benefited from the allotments of coal blocks?”

Sharma alleged in his petition coal blocks were arbitrarily allocated in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, West Bengal, Odisha and Madhya Pradesh. He also referred to 57 private companies, which are closely linked to men in power. The 194 block were allocated almost free of cost, Sharma said. He quoted the CAG report that said the government had flouted all rules and regulations while handing over the coal blocks and it had cost the exchequer a loss of Rs1.86 lakh crore.

This is not the first time that the apex court has intervened in a scam exposed by the CAG. 

A bench of justices GS Singhvi and AK Ganguli had ordered a CBI inquiry into the 2G spectrum allocation scam. The court had also ensured that the guilty were put on trial and jailed. l Turn to p4