New Delhi: A Delhi court Thursday awarded a four-year jail term to ex-Samata Party president Jaya Jaitly and two others. The jail term was for corruption in a 2000-01 case related to a defence deal, a lawyer said. Special CBI judge Virender Bhat also awarded four-year jail terms to Jaya Jaitly’s former party colleague Gopal Pacherwal and Major General (rtd) SP Murgai. This information was given by Murgai’s advocate Vikram Panwar.
The court, in an in camera proceeding, also imposed a fine of Rs 1,00,000 each on all three convicts. It also directed them to surrender before it till 5.00pm Thursday itself. The three were held guilty of corruption and criminal conspiracy in the purported purchase of hand-held thermal imagers.
The case stemmed from ‘Operation Westend’ sting aired by news portal ‘Tehelka’ in January 2001.
The court while convicting the three accused had a few observations. The court held that they, along with Surender Kumar Surekha (who later turned approver), were party to a criminal conspiracy. It took place between December 2000 and January 2001 at Delhi.
The court observed that Jaitly accepted illegal gratification of Rs 2,00,000 from Mathew Samuel, a representative of fictional company ‘Westend International’. Murgai on the other hand, received Rs 20,000. The illegal gratification was accepted for obtaining supply orders for hand held thermal imagers from the army.
All the three accused – Jaitly, Pacherwal and Murgai – were convicted of the offence of conspiracy (Section 120-B IPC read with Section 9 (Taking gratification, for exercise of personal influence with public servant) of Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act.
The court held it is ‘proved beyond doubt that in the meeting in a hotel room December 25, 2000 Surekha and Murgai assured their assistance to Samuel. They said that they will procure the letter of evaluation for the product of his company from the Ministry of Defence. They also promised to arrange a meeting between him and accused Jaya Jaitly. The latter would provide political cover to them in this regard’.
It was agreed that Samuel would pay Rs 1,00,000 each to Surekha and Murgai and Rs 2,00,000 to Jaitly, the court noted.
“Thus there had been an agreement between them to obtain the evaluation letter for the concerned product by illegal means,” the court said. It added that ‘accordingly, Pacherwal arranged the said meeting for December 28, 2000. He too was present in the said meeting in the room of Jaitly along with Surekha, Samuel and Murgai’.
The court further said: “In that meeting, which took place in the official residence of the then Union Minister for Defence, George Fernandes, Samuel was introduced to Jaitly as a businessman whose company intends to enter the market of defence procurement.
“Samuel offered the sum of Rs 2 lakh to Jaitly who instructed him to handover the money to Pacherwal and accordingly, the money was received by accused Pacherwal knowing that it was bribe money. In lieu thereof, Jaitly assured Samuel that in case the product of his company is not considered, she would intervene by making a request to ‘’Sahib’’ (purportedly the Defence Minister Mr. George Fernandes) to send a word to the concerned officer in this regard’.