Day after getting missing files from Coal Ministry, CBI says purpose still not solved

A day after the Central Bureau of Investigations (CBI) received more coal missing files from the coal ministry, the top sources in the agency said that ‘their purpose is still not solved.’

Sources said that they have received files which the agency has already managed to gather from other sources. ‘All files which we have received have already been accessed by our officers from other agencies in the past few days,’ a top CBI official said.

Meanwhile, coal ministry is learnt to have informed CBI that certain files remain untraceable. The investigation agency is now in the process of further examining the report submitted by the ministry and matching it against its own requirement to proceed with the investigation.

No complaint has been registered yet in this regard, but an action is likely to be taken as per Supreme Court’s direction by the CBI. Recently, Ranjit Sinha, director CBI, had said that it would be difficult to file chargesheets in some of the coal cases if it did not get its hands on a few particular files.

The Supreme Court had on 29 August directed CBI to furnish a comprehensive list of documents which are yet to be received from the government. The apex court had asked the government to make the documents available in two weeks. That deadline ended on Tuesday.

The CBI had, through Attorney General (AG) Goolam E Vahanvati, provided a fresh list of documents to the ministry containing outstanding papers yet to be furnished for the probe in alleged irregularities in coal block allocations between 1993 and 2009.

The new list contains 26 papers related to allocations for over two dozen companies including Tata Sponge Iron Ltd, Sunflag Iron & Steel, Adhunik Corp, Jharkhand Ispat, Rathi Steel & Power, Pushp Steel & Mining and Bhushan Power & Steel. The list also contains a recommendation letter from former Member of Parliament (MP) Vijay Darda, forwarded by the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO), for allocation of Bander coal block to AMR Iron & Steel and a report of Coal India’s experts on the financial strength of applicant companies.