FERA charges against Times of India's proprietor become a political football
FERA charges against the Times of India's proprietor become a political football.
Let truth prevail: so reads the motto of the venerable Times of India.But for the past six months, its proprietor Ashok Jain has been fighting a grim battle against an overzealous Enforcement Directorate (ED).
The battle, which is raging in the courts, took a serious political turn last week with BJP leader Atal Bihari Vajpayee accusing Prime Minister I.K. Gujral of shielding Jain because, as Vajpayee said, "Jain is his relative".
That they are related - Jain's daughter Nandita is married to Gujral's nephew, while his son Vineet's wife is Gujral's niece - is reason enough to attack a prime minister with an otherwise unsullied public image. Also buried in the shindig over Jain's alleged hawala transactions is another political game, which aims to discredit Congress President Sitaram Kesri, a long-time friend of the Jain family.
The ED has already acted upon a petition filed by Madhuresh, a well-known public-interest litigation gladiator. The petition alleges that Jain's brother Alok and Kesri had, way back in 1969, opened a 10,000 pounds illegal account in a London branch of Barclay's Bank. Based on such evidence, the ED interrogated Alok and temporarily detained two members of his office staff.
ED officials are now baying at India's pasha of publishing, demanding to interrogate him in the Kafkaesque antechambers of Lok Nayak Bhavan, the ED headquarters in New Delhi, like any other economic offender. Jain, who is a cardiac patient, is currently in a cabin at Indraprastha Apollo Hospital.
He has even resigned as managing director of Bennett Coleman, which owns the Times of India Group. But the ED argues he is feigning illness. On June 26, a sessions court in Delhi refused to grant Jain interim protection against arrest but asked the director of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences to set up a medical board to examine him.
To add a further twist to the tale, the ED offices were - unbelievably - "raided'' recently by Intelligence Bureau (IB) detectives. While the IB reports to the Home Ministry, the ED comes under the Revenue Department of the Finance Ministry. The two ministries came out with conflicting versions about the "raid".
Revenue Secretary N.K. Singh claimed to have acted out of concern for the safety of documents in the directorate. But IB Director Arun Bhagat said he received written orders from Singh to ascertain how a Finance Ministry memo of May 12 had leaked out to the media. The memo had stated that the Jain matter would henceforth be directly monitored by the Finance Minister.
While IB men rummaging the fax-sheets and visitors' slips of the directorate have left ED staff livid, the incident has given further credence to charges of Jain being politically protected. Former prime minister H.D. Deve Gowda has now entered the fray. With the BJP having already turned against Jain, Deve Gowda's stance adds to his travails.
The former prime minister is smarting under the insult of being dismissed by Kesri. Circles close to Deve Gowda say that he sees Jain's hand behind Kesri's move, a view which is stoutly denied by Jain.
The ED charge against the 63-year-old proprietor of the Rs 850-croreTimes of IndiaGroup is based on a judgement by Justice B.M. Mitra, member of a division bench in the Calcutta High Court, in October 1996.
The case related to a 24-year-old dispute between Jain and N.S. Hoon, an NRI businessman, over control of Turner Morrison, a formerly British-owned holding company. Hoon alleged Jain had illegally grabbed the company and violated FERA provisions in the process.
His petition was dismissed by the Calcutta High Court in 1985, but Hoon appealed before the division bench. However, before the main appeal was heard, Hoon filed an interlocutory application on the ground that it should be a trial of evidence, requiring Jain's presence in court. Justice Mitra's order relates to this side issue. Its annexure, which repeats all past charges by Hoon, later became the ED's "first information".
Main charges
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The ED carried out the January 4 raid on Jain's Sardar Patel Marg residence in the capital on the basis of this order. The team apparently found a set of visiting cards of Swiss investment bankers, and an offer by a Mauritius-based company to buy shares in Bennett Coleman.
ED sources say they also fished out a set of typewritten double-entry documents which could be evidence of illegal foreign transactions.
In March, the ED cracked down on Keshav Bangur, a Calcutta businessman who had acquired controlling shares of the Bank of Rajasthan. Bangur made a statement under Section 138 of the CrPC that he had bought Jain's one-third holding in the bank.
He said he had paid Jain a premium of Rs 4 crore obtained from Calcutta jute baron Arun Kumar Bajoria. The statement added Jain had been paid in dollars and that the money was transferred to an account abroad. The ED at once swooped down on Bajoria who is still frequently summoned by the authorities for interrogation.
The ED is a master in the art of dragging cases to court but is yet to prove it has the expertise to secure convictions. The much tom-tommed FERA case of 1996 against cigarette major ITC has not made much headway, though it has clobbered the company's reputation. And now, the stage seems set for a grand power play between the influential newspaper tycoon and an aggressive bureaucracy.