Skill scam: Mukul Rohatgi to oppose Naidu’s quash petition in Supreme Court on Tuesday

NEW DELHI: A bench of Justices Aniruddha Bose and Bela Trivedi hearing the matter of former Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu's petition to quash the FIR about the skill development scam case, will hear the arguments of AP CID represented by senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi on Tuesday.

On Monday, the court heard arguments of Naidu’s counsel Harish Salve and sought clarity on the application of section 17-A of the Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act quoting several High Court judgments that interpreted 17-A differently.

“On September 19 we made submissions, which were based on the premise that the FIR was registered in 2021. There is a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) published by the Government of India on how Sec 17A is to be applied. They have said that at every stage permission is to be taken,” Salve said, stressing the need for the governor’s permission to arrest Naidu.

Salve referred to the recent judgment in the Pankaj Bansal case to argue that if the arrest was illegal, then the subsequent remand order would not validate an illegal arrest.

At this juncture, Justice Bose asked when the inquiry started in the skill scam case. “It is based on a complaint of September 7, 2021,” Salve replied. He added that the complaint had nothing to do with the Petitioner.

“There was a company called Design Tech. Design Tech obtained GST credits from a company called Skill Tech or something. Please see the complaint dated September 7, 2021. It was against Siemens, Design Tech, etc alleging they swindled public money,” he said.

Salve said that the number of preliminary inquiries done in 2021 matched with the reference in FIR, to establish that the inquiry commenced only in 2021 and hence Section 17A of the PC Act is applicable to the case. He argued that change in the law of procedure applies retrospectively.

However, Justice Trivedi reminded Salve that Rohatgi submitted last time that the inquiry started before the coming of the 2018 amendment (which introduced Sec 17A).

“First of all, that statement is factually wrong. It was not the inquiry that led to this FIR. It appears some inquiry was done, which was folded up. Thereafter, a fresh inquiry was made," Salve submitted.

Urging the bench to quash the FIR, Salve said that 17A was introduced exactly to prevent cases like these, where a person is politically targeted after the change of regime.” It is a sorry attempt by the State to present a different picture of facts. On the question of interpretation of law, we may be right, we may be wrong. But blowing smoke on facts does not help,” he said.

“We are examining two things. One, whether the 5 July 2018 document was before the High Court and you had the opportunity to deal with it and if you had no such opportunity,” Justice Bose said, asking Salve whether he wanted to return to the lower court (AP High Court).

“In any case, sending back will not help me as the HC judge says the date of offense should be considered and not the date of filing the FIR,” Salve submitted.

Meanwhile, the bench wanted to know if the CID counsel submitted a compilation of all documents submitted before the AP High Court. Senior Advocate Mukul Rohatgi said that he had produced all the documents.