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Last of accused in Hawala case acquitted

Onkar Singh in New Delhi

The controversial Hawala case finally came to an end today when the last of the eight accused were discharged by the special judge V B Gupta.

In a 132 page judgment, the judge said there was nothing on record to show that any of the accused had obtained ''any pecuniary advantage either for themselves or anybody else."

Those acquitted include M P Narayanan, former chairman of Neyveli Lignite Corporation, former executive director of the company, N Venkatesan, former deputy general manager, P R Desikachari, former chief engineer S Ranganathan, N K Jain, K K Jain and S C Gupta.

The Hawala case had generated lot of heat in the mid-90s after a diary was recovered from Jain brothers containing names of top political leaders, including L K Advani, Madhavrao Scindia, Arif Mohammad Khan, Balram Jakhar, V C Shukla, Arjun Singh, Kalpnath Rai, Devi Lal, Ashok Sen, L P Sahi, Kamal Nath, Arvind Netam, C K Jaffar Sherif, N D Tewari, R K Dhawan, Madan Lal Khurana and a host of other prominent personalities.

L K Advani resigned as the leader of the opposition when the CBI named him as an accused in the case and decided not to participate in any of the elections until he was cleared of all the charges.

Today's acquittal came after the Supreme Court ruled that the Jain diaries could not be relied upon as evidence. "Writing of some names in the diary of some businessman does not mean that they were involved (in some wrongdoing). Merely writing down of the names does not constitute an offence," the court observed.

The Jain diaries had become a major embarrassment for the P V Narasimha Rao government as corruption became a major election issue and the Congress managed to win only 140 seats in the elections that followed - one of the party's worst performances.

The Central Bureau of Investigation, under the supervision of the then director Vijay Rama Rao, now a minister in the Telugu Desam Party government in Andhra Pradesh, filed cases against 29 leaders, 16 bureaucrats and some others for receiving bribes from Jain brothers - B R Jain, N K Jain, S K Jain and J K Jain.

The judge in his order said that there was no evidence to suggest a conspiracy between the accused to cause any wrongful loss to the NLC and a corresponding wrongful gain to Bhillai based M/S Syndicate Engineering Company owned by the Jains.

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