Court to hear documents leak case on April 19

A Delhi court today fixed April 19 for hearing the Petroleum Ministry documents leak case in which 13 accused, including five corporate executives, were chargesheeted by the police.
During the hearing, Crime Branch of Delhi Police supplied the copies of deficient documents to the accused after which Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Sanjay Khanagwal posted the matter for scrutiny of documents.
The court had earlier directed the police to supply copies of deficient documents to the accused.
Police has chargesheeted 13 accused in the case including five corporate executives -- Shailesh Saxena from Reliance Industries Ltd, Vinay Kumar from Essar, K K Naik from Cairns India, Subhash Chandra from Jubilant Energy and Rishi Anand from Reliance ADAG.

The other accused are multi-tasking staff in the Petroleum Ministry, Ishwar Singh and Asharam, former staff of the ministry Lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar, Defence Ministry employee Virender Kumar, private person Rajkumar Chaubey, energy consultant Prayas Jain and journalist Shantanu Saikia.
All the 13 accused are presently out on bail.

Earlier, the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had informed the court that eight documents allegedly recovered from the accused during the probe were classified in nature and none of these were in public domain.
The accused have been chargesheeted for alleged offences under various sections of IPC including 457 (trespass), 380 (theft), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine forged documents) read with 120-B (criminal conspiracy).

On February 20 last year, police had arrested the five corporate executives alleging they used to procure classified documents from Lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar and pay them.
The documents were then supplied to the firms by these officials for their benefit, the police had alleged.
Besides them, the police had also arrested Jain, Saikia, Singh, Asharam and Chaubey for allegedly conspiring to procure sensitive documents from different ministries including Petroleum and Natural Gas.
A total of 16 people have been arrested in connection with two separate FIRs lodged by the police.