Corporate espionage: Police charge sheet against 3 accused

Delhi Police today filed charge sheet against three arrested accused, including two government officials, in the corporate espionage case for allegedly possessing "sensitive" documents relating to various ministries.
The charge sheet was filed by Crime branch of Delhi Police against Lokesh Sharma, an employee of a Noida-based consultancy firm, Jitender Nagpal, PS to Joint Secretary in Forest and Environment Ministry, and Vipan Kumar, PA to a UPSC member, before the court of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Satish Kumar Arora.
The court, which fixed May 1 for the consideration on the charge sheet, said there were several unanswered questions in the probe, including as to how the recovered documents influenced the decision-making of those companies or the government.

It also said that the police needed to establish the link between series of events.
In its 250-page charge sheet, police has named 19 persons as witnesses in the case.
During the hearing, the police told the court that some laptops, monitors, software and electronic datas have been recovered from the accused persons. Some of the data has been deleted from the laptops, it said.

It also said Lokesh was getting around Rs 14,000 per month in his bank account from Noida-based consultancy firm Infraline Energy, one of the beneficiary companies, which suggest that he was an employee of the company.

Police also said that it has recovered some sensitive documents from the e-mail id of Vipan Kumar. However, the inbox and outbox of e-mail ids of several other persons, whom the agency interrogated during the probe, were found empty.
The Delhi Police had arrested Lokesh on February 23, claiming that "sensitive" documents pertaining to ministries of Coal, Power and others were recovered from his possession.
Jitender and Vipan were arrested on February 25 in the same FIR.
An FIR was registered by the Crime Branch under sections of trespass, theft, criminal conspiracy and fraud in this case separately from the one involved in the petroleum ministry racket in which the police had on April 18 filed charge sheet against 13 persons including five corporate executives.