The CBI faced a rift when a special court dismissed the closure report filed after a delay of 22 years in a 1995 urea scam case. The court warned the director of the agency that this should not happen again. The court has asked the Joint Director of Anti-Corruption Wing 1 of CBI to investigate the matter.
Special Judge Surinder Rathi in his order said that the last investigation by the CBI in the case was done in 1999. Since then the agency has kept the report on hold till now. He said that the CBI Director should take action in this. He will take appropriate steps to ensure that this does not happen again. The judge said that this is not a CBI case. It is incomprehensible why the same final report was kept on hold for so long and what was its purpose.
The agency had registered a case in May 1996 in the urea scam. The accused were accused of defrauding National Fertilizers Limited (NFL) to the tune of Rs 133 crore as part of a criminal conspiracy. Several NFL officials, businessmen and former Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao’s nephew B Sanjeev Rao were convicted in the main case.
The case in which the CBI filed the closure report was registered on June 4, 1997. The agency had named S Nuthi of US-based Alabama International Inc. along with former NFL managing director CK Ramakrishnan and executive director DS Kanwar, M Sambasiva Rao, chief executive of Hyderabad-based Sai Krishna Impex, in the case. The CBI, while filing its closure report against these accused in January 2021, had said that there was no financial loss in the case.
The court, in its order, said that Ramakrishnan and Kanwar were alleged to have repeatedly granted concessions to Sanjeeva Rao and Nuthi. While they had failed to supply urea. The performance guarantee (PG) bond issued in favor of the NFL should have been forfeited for failure to fulfill the contract under the rules. While this was not done. The agency is saying that there was no damage.
The special court observed that instead of forfeiting the two per cent PG bond on account of repeated failure to supply urea under the letter of intent, Kanwar gave them back to Nuthi on January 8, 1996, which led to the NFL being denied access to third parties. Was forced to buy urea from After going through the case file, the court said that the last investigation in the case was done on March 11, 1999 and thereafter the draft of the final report was prepared on March 17, 1999.