Govt submitted false info to the Court in sealed cover: Prashant Bhushan on Rafale verdict

Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, a petitioner in the Rafale case, on Friday said that the government has submitted false information in a sealed cover which led the Supreme Court to dismiss the petitions.

"When the judgment came, it contained some astounding facts that the Supreme Court had taken from the sealed cover given by the government. One of them was that a CAG report was submitted before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) and had been placed before Parliament and in the public which was wrong," Bhushan told reporters here.

The lawyer quoted a newspaper article to allege that the Prime Minister's office was directly involved in the deal negotiations.

He further said that the judge mentioned that Dassault Aviation, the maker of Rafale fighter jets, was "negotiating with businessman Anil Ambani's company since 2012 and therefore it could not be the Prime Minister's decision to bring in Anil Ambani into the deal. This fact was also turned out to be false."

He claimed the information given by the Centre in a sealed cover formed the basis of the court dismissing the review petitions.

"On the basis of information given by the government in a sealed cover which was not even given to us, they (the Supreme Court) proceeded to dismiss the petition by saying that this does not come under the contours of their jurisdiction under Article 32," Bhushan told reporters here.

He also said that the court erred in clubbing several petitions seeking review of its December 2018 order in the case.

"The SC clubbed all petitions. One of them was seeking to scrap the contract. Our plea was also dealt with as if we were asking for the scrapping of the contract rather than seeking investigation into our complaint to the CBI," he said.

He said that the three-member Supreme Court bench relied upon the information given in a sealed cover to dismissed the review petitions on Thursday. "After seeing the information given by the government, they felt that there was no need for the court to embark upon a detailed prob and on that basis, our petition was dismissed," the lawyer said.

A three-member bench of Chief Justice Ranjan Gogoi on Friday dismissed a batch of petitions seeking review in its December 2018 which upheld the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter jets from France.