Show-cause notices issued in petrol pumps scam

A division bench comprising Justice Y K Sabharwal and Justice D K Jain directed the people to file replies to the notices by April 3 and fixed the hearings for April 10.

The bench directed the issuance of notices after a four-hour hearing. The judges took the time to go through the report of a three-member advocates committee set up to examine the allotments and the proformas and original files relating to some of the allotments.

The nearly 450 allotments were made from the petroleum minister's discretionary quota during the tenure of B Shankaranand and Satish Sharma over 1992-96.

Several of the notices issued on Thursday, February 27, were to residents of Sharma's erstwhile Lok Sabha constituency of Sultanpur.

Notices were also issued to Deve Gowda's daughter-in-law T S Anitha and the law secretary's wife Usha Aggarwal.

Prominent among others issued notices were member of Parliament Rita Verma and Madhya Pradesh Cabinet Minister Kanti Lal Bhuria.

According to the report filed by the advocates committee most of the allotments made from the discretionary quota were on ''vague and flimsy'' grounds.

Most of these applications were received directly by the ministers or their secretaries and were approved without any verification of the grounds on which the allotment of petrol pumps or cooking gas, kerosene and diesel retail outlets was being sought, the report said.

While in most cases the files never went to the officials of the petroleum ministry, in some cases the objections of the officials were overruled by the ministers, noted the committee comprising advocates Neeraj Kishan Kaul, Sandeep Sethi and Sanjeev Khanna.

The high court is examining the validity of these allotments following an order of the Supreme Court in September last year. The apex court, which cancelled 15 of these allotments, had imposed ''exemplary damages'' of Rs 5 million on Satish Sharma for misusing the discretionary quota, leading to a breach of public trust.

The committee, which examined all the 450-odd allotment files except those which the Supreme Court had cancelled, further noted that in most cases the applications were recommended by influential persons or VIPs.

In some cases, guidelines set by the Supreme Court in March 1995 on the discretionary quota of the ministers were also flouted, it said.

Broadly, the apex court guidelines had laid down that the dealerships from the discretionary quota should be given to those in acute financial distress.

The bench said it would take up the examination of the remaining files on March 20 as also the allotment of some 30 petrol pumps by the oil selection board of Delhi and Chandigarh during 1995-96.

Today's notices were sent to some ''glaring cases'' highlighted by the committee in its report.

The judges directed Assistant Registrar D K Prashad, in whose custody all the files are kept, to supervise the preparation of the notices. They further directed that notices be sent along with the relevant proforma prepared by the committee for the allottee.

The high court will examine the validity of the allotments made by Shankaranand and Sharma from their discretionary quota between April one 1992 and June-July 1996.

The court was informed by the federal government that with effect from June-July 1996, the discretionary quota had been abolished.

The court will go into 432 allotments, the majority of them made by Sharma after he took over as the petroleum minister in May 1993.

According to the committee report, during Shankaranand's tenure, applications from persons seeking allotment were first examined by the minister and the note of approval was generally written by him on the application or on the letter of recommendation. After approval, the file was forwarded and officially received in the ministry.

There was hardly any verification of the statements in the application and most applicants did not file any biodata, nor gave details of annual income, nor furnished any affidavit specifying whether or not any of them or their close relatives are already dealers of petroleum products.

''Surprisingly, the ministry had not even called for such details and particulars,'' the report noted.

In Sharma's case, the report noted that in some cases, his secretary Gurcharan Singh, first examined the applications and submitted a note for the minister. In terms of the note, Sharma approved the application. In most of these cases, there was no verification and the allotments were made in a ''most casual manner'', it added.

Following the Supreme Court guidelines of March 1995, the applicants were asked to file their bio-data and affidavits before the letter of intent was issued. However, this was done generally after the minister had already approved the allotment, the report said.

In fact, before approval of allotment by the minister, the application in most cases was never examined by an officer in the ministry, it pointed out.

''Allotments were sought on plea of financial difficulty but no details of income or wealth were furnished or called for. A large number of allotments were made on the basis of applications which were vague and flimsy, containing averments of a general nature which did not justify allotment to the applicant alone as against lakhs of other persons who would fit the same description,'' the report observed.

It further noted that while the discretionary allotment prior to 1988-89 numbered 20, in 1988-89 these were increased to 25, in 1989-90 they were increased to 85 and during 1990-91 to 115. Thereafter, the quota had been increased to 155 per year.

UNI