New Delhi:
A Delhi court is likely to frame on Thursday charges against sacked Commonwealth Games (CWG) Organising Committee (OC) chief Suresh Kalmadi for allegedly cheating, conspiring, abusing his official position and causing a loss of over Rs 90 crore to public exchequer in in a games-related graft case.
Special CBI Judge Ravinder Kaur is slated to frame charges against Kalmadi and nine others, including former OC Secretary General Lalit Bhanot, under various provisions of the Indian Penal Code and the Prevention of Corruption (PC) Act.
The court on December 21 last year had ordered framing of charges against the accused and had fixed the matter for January 10 for formally framing charges against them.
Besides cheating and conspiracy, the accused will also be charged with the offences of forgery under the IPC and criminal misconduct by public servants under the PC Act.
"Charges under section 120B (criminal conspiracy), read with 201 (destruction of evidence), 420 (cheating), 467, 468, 471 (relating to forgery), 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC and section 13(1)(d) read with section 13(2) (criminal misconduct by public servants) of the PC Act is ordered to be framed against all the accused," the court had said.
The accused have been charge-sheeted by the CBI for "illegally" awarding a contract to install Timing, Scoring and Results (TSR) system for the 2010 CWG to Swiss Timing at inflated rates causing a loss of over Rs 90 crore to the public exchequer.
Besides Kalmadi and Bhanot, the other accused in the case are OC's Director General V K Verma, Director General (Procurement) Surjit Lal, Joint Director General (Sports) A S V Prasad and Treasurer M Jayachandran. They are no more associated with the sporting body.
The court had said substantial charges of misusing their official positions have been made out against six former OC officials, who were public servants.
Apart from the six, promoters of two construction firms - P D Arya and A K Madan of Faridabad-based Gem International and A K Reddy of Hyderabad-based AKR Constructions are also accused in the case. Swiss Timing Omega is also an accused in the case.
The court, while ordering framing of charges against the accused, had said that as accused Swiss Timing Omega, which was allegedly awarded the contract at exorbitant rates, is not appearing in the court despite proper service of summons, its "trial is separated."
The CBI had alleged that Kalmadi and others had rejected Spanish firm MSL's much lower bid of Rs 62 crore and awarded the contract to Swiss Timing Omega, causing a loss of over Rs 90 crore to the exchequer.
During the arguments on charges, CBI counsel V K Sharma had argued that Kalmadi and others had decided to award the contract for installing the TSR system for the CWG to Swiss Timing even before the firm had bid for it.
Kalmadi's counsel, however, had argued that the facts given in the CBI's charge sheet were contrary to the documents which the agency had filed in the court.
Kalmadi had told the court that he was only doing the work assigned to him as the OC chairman and nothing wrong was done by him in the entire process.
The counsel appearing for other accused had also opposed the allegations levelled against them by the CBI