New Delhi: Alleging collusion between the government and Reliance Industries Ltd., veteran communist lawmaker Gurudas Dasgupta yesterday told the Supreme Court that Petroleum Minister Veerappa Moily overruled every recommendation adversely affecting the company’s operations in KG basin without justifying his decisions.
“Moily overruled every authority” and a “series of people from the petroleum ministry, finance ministry, two parliamentary committees, hydrocarbon regulator DGH, CAG, and experts” and changed decisions that were inconvenient to RIL, said counsel Colin Gonsalves, appearing for the Communist parliamentarian.
Praising officials for not budging from “technical and principled” positions despite Moily coming in as petroleum minister in place of S Jaipal Reddy, Dasgupta told the the bench of Justice BS Chauhan, Justice J Chelameswar and Justice Kurian Joseph that even three months before the general elections, Moily was committing the government with a decision that will “saddle future governments and generations” with the consequences of doubling the gas price from $4.2 to $8.4 mmbtu.”
The court was told this in the course of a hearing on two PILs seeking the junking of the government’s decision to increase the gas price from $4.2 mmbtu to $8.4 mmbtu and NGO Common Cause seeking a probe into the increase in gas prices, grant of retrospective tax benefits and lack of insistence on relinquishment of gas blocks in KG basin by Reliance Industries.
Gonsalves told that court that the CAG had pointed to huge irregularities in records that were shown to it by Reliance Industries and the government auditor faced large-scale obstruction in accessing the records.
He argued that there was a range of breaches of the production sharing contract by the company.
When the court inquired why Reliance was being paid in dollars, Gonsalves told the court that it was a serious matter as the gas produced was being used in the country.
As he touched on the way Director General Hydrocarbons (DGH), R N Chaubey, was shunted out for not falling in line, lawyer Prashant Bhushan referred to (former corporate lobbyist Niira) the Radia tapes, in which the appointment of the DGH was discussed.
He said it was one of the several things the apex court had asked the CBI to investigate.
“There was collusion across the board between the government and the RIL,” Bhushan, appearing for Common Cause, told the court.
IANS
