HC Rejects CBI Probe Pleas Against Adani, RIL

The petitions filed by 61-year-old Silvassa resident Jitendra Maru alleged that AGEL and its partners paid millions in bribes to secure solar power contracts in multiple states and that RIL was illegally extracting natural gas from ONGC’s Krishna-Godavari Basin fields.

In the petition, Maru described it as a “massive organized fraud”, alleging that RIL had drilled deep-sea wells between 2004 and 2013-2014, allowing gas to pass from adjacent ONGC blocks to the KG-D6 field. However, the court rejected the plea saying, “Just because the petitioner has made some allegations in this writ petition, he cannot claim the right to seek registration of an FIR against the fourth respondent (RIL), its officers, Directors etc.”

The court added that the petition amounted to “a clear abuse of the Court process.”

Emphasizing that the powers in Article 226 serve the public interest, the court said that the plaintiff must prove that he has good faith and disclose all material facts. “He must come to the court clean, his hands are not dirty… This writ petition fails in every case and has been filed with a dirty motive,” he said.

In the case against AGEL, Maru relied heavily on materials obtained from the U.S. criminal indictment and related Securities and Exchange Commission cases. He alleged that AGEL and Delhi-based Azure Global paid bribes of more than Rs 2,000 crore to officials of power distribution companies in Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Jammu & Kashmir to get solar power contracts at inflated tariffs.

The court found the allegations justified and rejected the petition, stating that the plaintiff did not apply to the court with “clean hands”. “This writ petition does not serve any public purpose. On the contrary, a petition like the present petition causes serious harm and is likely to harm the reputation and business prospects of any corporate group,” the bench said.