A fresh application has been filed in the Supreme Court seeking a direction to the Centre to initiate criminal prosecution against the former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, following the quashing of 214 of the 218 coal block allotments made from 1993 to 2011 on the ground that they were illegally allotted.
Advocate M.L. Sharma, one of the petitioners in the coal block allocation case, has filed the application, which also seeks the prosecution of the former Coal Ministers Sriprakash Jaiswal and Shibu Soren.
The court, while quashing the allotments, had said, “The Screening Committee has never been consistent, it has not been transparent, there is no proper application of mind, it has acted on no material in many cases, relevant factors have seldom been its guiding factors, there was no transparency and guidelines have seldom guided it. On many occasions, guidelines have been honoured more in their breach. There were no objective criteria, nay, no criteria for evaluation of comparative merits. The approach had been ad hoc and casual. There was no fair and transparent procedure, all resulting in unfair distribution of the national wealth. Common good and public interest have, thus, suffered heavily.”
