Petitioners in the Rafale case have accused the Centre of “willfully and deliberately” mileading the Supreme Court, which they allege is tamtamount to “wholesale fraud”.
In their 41-page written submission, the petitioners have argued that a case of perjury should be lodged against officials responsible for “suppressing the facts” of the Rafale purchase, according to a report in The Hindu.
The petitioners, including former Union Ministers Yashwant Sinha and Arun Shourie and advocate Prashant Bhushan said, in their submissions: “It suppressed the truth and thereby insinuated utter falsehoods: facts and documents of the greatest significance, which have direct and overarching bearing on the matter that the court was considering, and which were available with the government were suppressed from the court.”
“It was not just one fact or document that might have been left out accidentally. But a series, and all of them conformed to a pattern... The court placed its trust in the government – as a result, in reaching the conclusions that it did, the court relied almost wholly on the notes that the government had submitted; and the government abused that trust,” the petitioners argued.
They also said that the government had kept the court in the dark about the “parallel negotiations” conducted by the Prime Minister’s Office, the report added.
They also alleged that “notwithstanding objections of the Ministry of Defence and the mandatory provisions of the Defence Procurement Procedure, National Security Advisor (NSA) Ajit Doval again interfered without mandate and conducted negotiations with the French in Paris on 12.01.2016 and 13.01.2016 on issues of Bank Guarantee, Sovereign Guarantee, Seat of Arbitration, etc”.
During the arguments, on 10 May, Bhushan had alleged suppression of material facts from the court by the Centre and said that as many eight critical clauses of the standard defence procurement procedure were dropped in the deal in the meeting of Cabinet Committee on Security in September 2016.
Attorney General KK Venugopal had vehemently opposed the submissions and sought dismissals of the review pleas saying that the basic grounds of these pleas were the same as in the main case.
“The Supreme Court has already decided the challenge to the Rafale deal. I would still say that the petitioners are seeking review of the judgment on the basis of secret stolen documents,” Venugopal had told the court, as per PTI.
The Attorney General had also referred to the CAG report and said that it has been found that the government got the jets at 2.86 percent lower price.
(With inputs from The Hindu, PTI)
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