CBI gets 5-day custody of ‘prime conspirator’ Karti

NEW DELHI: Special CBI judge Sunil Rana remanded Karti Chidambaram in CBI custody for five days at the end of an intense hearing on Thursday in which the agency accused the son of former finance minister P Chidambaram of being the “ultimate beneficiary” and “prime conspirator” of the INX Media payoff case, and the defence attacked the agency for relying on the statement of murder accused Indrani Mukerjea.
“The police remand of accused Karti Chidambaram is necessary to confront the accused with documents, co-accused and to unearth the larger conspiracy and role of other accused,” Rana said in his order after exchanges stretching for three hours.

Karti’s counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi questioned the credibility of Indrani Mukerjea, who, along with her husband Peter, launched INX Media, and who is being prosecuted for murdering her daughter Sheena Bora.

“A person (Indrani) who is accused of killing her own daughter and burying her in the ground makes a confession 10 years later and the CBI arrests him,” Singhvi said, questioning the veracity of Indrani’s statement recorded before a magistrate where she claimed to have paid bribes to Karti to get the Foreign Investment Promotion Board (FIPB) to ignore the irregularities committed by INX Media to access foreign direct investment.

Chidambaram was finance minister when INX Media was permitted to source funds from abroad despite alleged illegalities. Singhvi also argued that far from colluding with INX Media, Chidambaram had, in fact, forwarded senior journalist Vir Sanghvi’s complaint against the company to the serious fraud investigation office in 2008.

He said the SFIO report, which came in November 2013, was a “striking and stinking indictment” of the Mukerjeas. “Very strange to say that my father was helping INX; my father was helping people giving confessional statements (against me) now,” Karti’s counsel said.

Singhvi’s arguments were strongly rebutted by additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who stressed that while Indrani’s statement that she paid $700,000 was indeed a vital piece of evidence, the CBI was not relying solely on her testimony.

The ASG, who appeared along with CBI prosecutor V K Sharma, said the agency had emails and invoices indicating INX Media paid money to Advantage Strategic Consulting Private Limited around the same time it received favours from the finance ministry. “INX made foreign remittances in 33 instances...

This is not a witchhunt and not a vendetta, but a case on the basis of unimpeachable material,” the law officer said. Mehta refuted the defence’s argument that Karti was no longer associated with ASCPL when it was engaged by INX Media to get the infringement of FIPB rules “regularised”.