The Supreme Court directed the Income Tax Department on Thursday to transcribe all intercepted conversations of the corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and submit the compilation to the it within two months.
The apex court bench of Justice G S Singhvi and Justice S J Mukhopadhyaya said that some of the intercepted calls have security implications because of dubious financial transactions and foreign connections involved. The government had earlier claimed the existence of about 5,800 tapes.
The bench said that the complete transcripts of the Radia tapes were necessary to address the request from the Centre for Public Interest Litigation [CPIL], seeking directions to place these transcripts in the public domain. The court was hearing the petition of Ratan Tata, who wants to restrain the media from publishing the transcripts of these tapes.
The Income Tax Department had tapped Radia's phone with various business leaders and politicians on the complaint of the finance ministry. Later, these tapes played a big role in exposing the 2G spectrum scam.
The CPIL had requested that all these conversations should be made public except the ones which are purely personal in nature. The CPIL had also demanded that the conversations which show some illegality or criminality should be thoroughly investigated and matters be taken to their logical conclusion.
The court direction came when the additional solicitor general A S Chandhok said that the Income Tax Department did not prepare the transcripts but merely played them and prepared a report on relevant material for appraisal by the review committee.
The Supreme Court had pulled up the government last month over the leak of the Radia tapes, saying that its probe report was 'hardly satisfactory'. The court had also observed the central government's failure to put in place a proper mechanism to prevent such leaks in future.