News Detail

Alleging collusion between the government and Reliance Industries Ltd, veteran communist lawmaker Gurudas Dasgupta on Tuesday told the Supreme Court that Petroleum Minister Veerappa Moily overruled every recommendation adversely affecting the company's operations in KG basin without justifying his decision.

"Moily overruled every authority" and "series of people from the petroleum ministry, finance ministry, two parliamentary committees, hydrocarbon regulator DGH, CAG, and experts" and changed decisions that were inconvenient to RIL, said counsel Colin Gonsalves, appearing for the Communist parliamentarian.

Praising officials for not budging from "technical and principled" positions despite Moily coming in as petroleum minister in place of S Jaipal Reddy, Dasgupta told the the bench of Justice BS Chauhan, Justice J Chelameswar and Justice Kurian Joseph that even three months before the general elections, Moily was committing the government with a decision that will "saddle the future governments and generations" with the consequences of doubling the gas prices from $4.2 to $8.4 mmbtu.

The court was told this in the course of a hearing of two PILs seeking the junking of the government decision to increase the gas price from $4.2 mmbtu to $8.4 mmbtu and NGO Common Cause seeking an SIT/CBI probe into the increase of gas prices, giving retrospective tax benefits and not insisting on the relinquishment of gas blocks in KG basin by Reliance Industries.

Gonsalves told that court that the CAG had pointed to huge irregularities in the records that were shown to it by Reliance Industries and the government auditor faced a large scale obstruction in accessing the records.He argued that there was whole range of breaches of the production sharing contract by the company.

Source-On Request