NEW DELHI, May 16: A Delhi court today directed CBI to file its response on Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Usman Balwa’s plea seeking permission to withdraw the answers given by him earlier in reply to the court’s query in the ongoing trial in 2G spectrum allocation case.
Special CBI Judge O P Saini posted the matter for further hearing on May 22 and asked CBI to file its response.
Balwa, who had on May 10 faced the court’s ire which said he “deserved” to be taken in custody for his misconduct, filed a plea contending he will “not raise any question of prejudice caused to him on the ground of non-understanding of any questions” asked by the court.
The 2G case accused had also requested the court to take on record the written answers afresh.
He had said that during recording of his statement, which was deferred by the judge, all the questions were “explained properly” by the court and due to “some inadvertence” it was recorded in some questions that he was not able to understand some of the queries.
Special public prosecutor U U Lalit had earlier told the court that Balwa’s contention that he did not understand questions asked by the court under the provisions of the CrPC was only to take advantage in future.
However, Balwa had apologised to the judge, saying he had not done anything intentionally.
The stage for the recording of evidence of former Telecom Minister A Raja and 16 other accused, including DMK MP Kanimozhi, was set earlier when the court supplied a draft questionnaire containing 1,718 questions running into 824 pages to the accused.
Besides Raja and Kanimozhi, former Telecom Secretary Siddharth Behura, Raja’s erstwhile private secretary R K Chandolia, Shahid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka, Unitech Ltd MD Sanjay Chandra, Reliance ADAG executives Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara and Hari Nair are facing trial in the case.
Directors of Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Pvt Ltd Asif Balwa and Rajiv Agarwal, Sharad Kumar and Bollywood producer Karim Morani are also accused in the case.
Besides these 14 accused, three telecom firms Swan Telecom Pvt Ltd, Reliance Telecom Ltd and Unitech Wireless (Tamil Nadu) Ltd are also facing trial in the case. (PTI)
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