The Supreme Court has issued notices to the Centre and Essar Group.
The Supreme Court today agreed to examine a request for a CBI probe into allegations that politicians, bureaucrats and journalists were given expensive gifts, including luxury holidays, by the Essar Group for business gains.
Acting on a petition, the court issued notices to Essar, the Centre and the CBI, and asked them to respond in six weeks.
The petition cites a series of internal emails and documents leaked by a whistle-blower, allegedly a former Essar employee, and published by the Indian Express newspaper last month.
Some of the emails reveal that central minister Nitin Gadkari and his family used Essar vice chairman Ravi Ruia's super-luxury yacht for a cruise in July, 2013.
"Two years ago we had gone to Norway. When Essar found out, they told me they had a yacht off the coast of France and invited me to see it," Mr Gadkari told the media, asserting that he did nothing wrong as he was not the BJP president at the time and didn't hold any official post.
Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, the petitioner, told the court that Congress politicians Sriprakash Jaiswal, Digvijaya Singh and Beni Prasad Verma, and BJP MP Varun Gandhi, all got jobs for their candidates at Essar.
"Essar, in turn, apparently gets favoured by influential persons who take executive decisions, change public policies, raise questions in Parliament, leak government documents and plant stories in the media," Mr Bhushan said.