The Delhi High Court has directed the Centre to promote Indian Revenue Service (IRS) officer Ashok Kumar Aggarwal, with all consequential benefits, noting that criminal cases registered by the CBI against him were filled with “malice”.
A Bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Deepa Sharma upheld a February-2016 order of Central Administrative Tribunal in which it had quashed two memorandum of charges against Mr. Aggarwal and issued directions to the Centre to give all such promotions to him as had been given to his juniors.
Mr. Aggarwal had started as an Income Tax Officer Group A’ in December 1985 and was promoted to the post of Joint Commissioner of Income Tax. The 1985-batch IRS officer had held the position of Deputy Director of the Enforcement Directorate (Delhi zone) during 1997-1998.
Cases registered
The corruption cases were initiated after he started investigating into alleged Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA) violations by a businessman.
He was suspended on December 28, 1999 after the CBI registered two cases against him – one for allegedly framing the businessman in a FERA violation case and the other for allegedly amassing assets disproportionate to his known sources of income.
The tribunal had set aside his suspension order in 2003. The Centre had challenged the tribunal’s order before the Supreme Court, which had in December 2013, ordered Mr. Aggarwal’s reinstatement and withdrawal of all disciplinary actions against him.
The High Court noted that in the first case, when the approver status was taken away from hawala and arms dealer Abhishek Verma, he confessed that CBI forced him to make false statement against Mr. Aggarwal.
In the second case, the High Court had in 2006 noted the high-handedness of the probing agency and directed the registration of FIR against the CBI officers.
“These facts are sufficient for the court to conclude that these two criminal cases were registered by CBI with malafide intentions...,” the Bench remarked.
