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Coal scam: SC orders trial by special court
Legal Correspondent

New Delhi, July 18
The Supreme Court today ordered the setting up of a special court to conduct trial in all CBI cases relating to the coal block allocation scam involving several private companies and top government functionaries.

A Bench headed by Chief Justice RM Lodha asked the Delhi High Court to constitute the special court for a speedy trial. The Bench, which included Justices MB Lokur and Kurian Joseph, also made it clear that an eminent lawyer would be appointed as a special prosecutor to argue the cases effectively in the trial court. It sought suggestions from the PIL petitioners, Solicitor General Ranjit Kumar and the CBI in this regard.

During the arguments, the name of senior advocate Gopal Subramanium cropped up. Subramanium had recently opted out of being considered for appointment as a judge of the SC following the NDA government’s reluctance to accept the SC collegium’s recommendation.

The apex court is hearing PILs seeking cancellation of about 250 allotments of coal blocks made by the UPA government between 2004 and 2012 – 101 for the steel sector, 97 for the power industry, ten for cement and 37 for “commercial use.”

Among the petitioners are former Secretaries, including Cabinet Secretary TSR Subramanian, and Common Cause, an NGO, alleging that the Centre had gone for massive allocation of the scarce natural resource to a few select private companies at no cost in a completely arbitrary and non-transparent manner, causing a huge loss to the public exchequer running into tens of lakhs of crores of rupees.

Among the other petitioners are former Chief Election Commissioner N Gopalaswami, former Union Secretaries Ramaswamy Iyer and Sushil Tripathi and Admirals (retd) RH Tahiliani and L Ramdas, who has been the Navy chief. The CBI has already filed several chargesheets in these cases in various CBI courts. Now, these would be transferred to the proposed special court for expeditious disposal.