Petro Gate: Police files chargesheet against 13 accused

Delhi Police today filed a charge sheet against 13 persons, including five executives of major corporate houses and a scribe arrested in connection with the Petroleum Ministry documents leak case, as it did not rule out slapping charges under the Official Secrets Act against them.
Among the 13 chargesheeted accused are five corporate executives -- Shailesh Saxena from RIL, 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 Ishwar Singh, Asharam, Lalta Prasad, Rakesh Kumar, who were working as multi-tasking staff in the Ministry, Defence Ministry staffer Virender Kumar, Rajkumar Chaubey (a private person), energy consultant Prayas Jain and journalist Shantanu Saikia.

All the accused are currently in judicial custody. At the time of their arrest, Lalta Prasad and Rakesh Kumar had left their jobs in the Petroleum Ministry.
The 44-page charge sheet was filed before Metropolitan Magistrate Akash Jain, who fixed it for consideration on April 20 before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Sanjay Khanagwal who was on leave today.
Police sources said the provisions of the stringent Official Secrets Act (OSA) have not been invoked against the accused yet as investigation in the case was going on.

The police has chargesheeted all these accused for alleged offences under sections 457 (trespass), 380 (theft), 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for the purpose of cheating), 471 (using as genuine forged documents), 34 (common intention) and 120-B (criminal conspiracy) of the IPC, the sources said.

They said 42 persons have been arrayed as prosecution witnesses in the charge sheet.
On April 15, Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas had filed a report before another court, which is hearing the bail pleas of the five corporate executives and Virender Kumar, saying that eight documents recovered from the accused were classified in nature and none of them were in public domain.
The bail applications of these six accused would come up for hearing on April 20 before Additional Sessions Judge Raj Kapoor, who had on April 10 sought reports from Ministries of Home and Petroleum about the nature of documents recovered by the investigators during the probe.