New Delhi: A special court on Monday said that in the wake of the Delhi High Court circular that no adjournment will be given owing to lawyers strike in 2G telecom spectrum allocation scam case in which former Telecom Minister A Raja, DMK MP Kanimozhi and 15 others are facing trial.
"When I and the Special Public Prosecutor are not on strike, then how can the court grant you adjournment owing to lawyers strike? We have received a Delhi High Court circular which says no adjournment should be granted due to the strike," Special CBI Judge O P Saini said.
The court made the observation after the defence counsel submitted during the ongoing final arguments of the case that adjournment should be granted till lawyers' strike which is likely to be over in August as senior lawyers were not available.
The court, however, adjourned the matter till July 30 after defence counsel said that the application of CBI relating to filing of additional documents by it suffers from several deficiencies and complete set of papers have not been given.
The court also directed CBI to supply a soft and hard copy of deficient documents to the accused today itself.
"Reply to the application be filed by or before the next date with copy to the prosecution. In view of the complicated facts and voluminous record of the case, prayer for adjournment allowed.
"Put up the matter for reply, if any, to the application and for further final arguments on July 30, as prayed by both parties, and some time is also required by the court for going through the voluminous evidence and record of the case," the court said.
During the final arguments earlier, CBI had alleged that Raja had "misled" the then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on policy matters pertaining to 2G spectrum allocation in conspiracy with others to favour certain firms.
CBI had alleged that favour was done to "ineligible" firms Unitech Wireless (Tamil Nadu) Ltd and Swan Telecom Pvt Ltd at the behest of Raja who had changed the first-come-first-served policy to suit them.
In its charge sheet, CBI had said that there was a loss of Rs 30,984 crore to the exchequer in allocation of 122 licences for 2G spectrum which were scrapped by the Supreme Court on February 2, 2012.
Besides Raja and Kanimozhi, former Telecom Secretary Siddharth Behura, Raja's erstwhile private secretary R K Chandolia, Swan Telecom Pvt Ltd promoters Shahid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka, Unitech Ltd MD Sanjay Chandra and three top executives of Reliance ADAG -- Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara and Hari Nair -- are facing trial in the case.
Directors of Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Pvt Ltd Asif Balwa and Rajiv Agarwal, Kalaignar TV Director Sharad Kumar and Bollywood producer Karim Morani are also accused in the case.
Besides these, 14 accused persons, three telecom firms -- Swan Telecom Pvt Ltd (STPL), Reliance Telecom Ltd and Unitech Wireless (Tamil Nadu) Ltd -- are also accused in the case.
The court had on October 22, 2011, framed charges against them under IPC and Prevention of Corruption Act dealing with offences of criminal conspiracy, cheating, forgery, faking documents, abusing official position, criminal misconduct by public servant and taking bribe.
The offences entail punishment ranging from six months in jail to life imprisonment.
