Advocate Prashant Bhushan and NGO, Centre for Public interest Litigation, on Tuesday submitted before the Supreme Court that they are ready to be prosecuted if the information given by them regarding CBI director Ranjit Sinha’s alleged misconduct proved to be wrong.
Asking a bench headed by Chief Justice H L Dattu to order inquiry and take action against the top cop for allegedly meeting various persons accused in the 2G and coal block allocation scam and “interfering” in the probe, they said that they are ready to face the “consequences” if the information provided to the court turns out to be false.
“We would face prosecution. I am saying so without looking at them. They must face consequences. They have forfeited the right to defence on the ground that the information was given to him by someone else,” senior advocate Dushyant Dave, appearing for Bhushan and the NGO’s secretary Kamini Jaiswal said.
Countering the submission of Sinha’s counsel Vikas Singh that Bhushan must reveal the name of the whistleblower who supplied the documents, Dave submitted that the court can take cognisance of such information without knowing the source.
Dave submitted that the information provided against the Director needs to be probed and the court should not insist on disclosure of the whistleblower’s name.
'Trust sacrosanct '
Expressing inability to disclose the whistleblower’s name, he said, “Trust (of whistleblower) is sacrosanct and if it is broken then nobody would come forward to give information“.
Singh, however, insisted that such disclosure is a must before the court proceeds with the matter and alleged that there has been a move on the part of Bhushan to destroy the institution of CBI by making false allegations against its Director.
He said that the CBI Director, who is demitting office on December 2, never overruled the opinion of its investigating officer and other officers in 2G scam and the trail of money abroad in the scam was probed only on his direction.
