Tata Power submitted wrong statements: Govt tells SC

The Supreme Court today adjourned the hearing on the Sasan coal dispute between Tata Power Company and Reliance Power to November 8. The case was adjourned after Attorney General G E Vahanvati submitted that Tata Power had filed an affidavit containing wrong statements.

The AG told a bench headed by Justice G S Singhvi that the documents filed by Tata Power were not part of the Delhi High Court records as was claimed by the company.

The Reliance counsel also raised the issue and pleaded that the case should be dismissed on this very ground. The court then asked the government to file a short reply giving details before the next hearing.

The court was hearing Tata Power’s appeal challenging the government nod to the Anil Ambani group firm R-Power to use coal from captive mines for projects other than the Rs 20,000 crore Sasan ultra mega power project.

Tata Power has said it did not waive its right as a bidder by not participating in the entire process for Sasan, admitting though that it could not have matched the successful bid of Reliance Power.

In a press release issued later in the day, the company criticised the government and RPower stating that instead of arguing the case they sought to stand on “an unfortunate error which had crept into the application filed by our lawyers for putting on record few additional documents which inadvertently referred to documents placed on record in the high court”.

The company said the lawyers would be filing an application to tender unconditional apology to the court. It maintained that the documents that were downloaded from the website of the Ministry of Coal amplify its case that there was an out of turn allocation of large amount of coal made to RInfra’s other projects, though this coal was meant for exclusive use of Sasan UMPP.

“The documents show that there were more than 700 applications of coal linkage/captive coal mine that were superseded in the process by the government including many applications made by projects to be set up in the state of Madhya Pradesh,” said the company release.

Tata group originally challenged before the high court the decision of an Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoM) that had allowed R-Power to use excess coal from the captive mines meant for the Sasan project in Madhya Pradesh for another 4,000-Mw project at Chitrangi, in the same state.

The government had questioned the locus standi of Tata Power, arguing that it could not allege violation of any legal right vis-a-vis the tender process, as it waived its right by not extending the bid.