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Alleged phone conversations between top political and corporate power brokers of India may indicate how easy it is to ‘manage’ issues of national relevance behind the scenes.
These conversations, apparently recorded in the early 2000s during NDA-I’s tenure according to a letter by Supreme Court advocate Suren Uppal (and now revealed by Indian Express and Outlook) reportedly disclosed:
The recordings are yet to be submitted to the authorities for official investigation or judicial scrutiny.
Former union ministers who held portfolios like railways, finance and defence, heads of India’s biggest corporate conglomerates, their wives, Bollywood actors, senior bureaucrats, heads of PSU banks and many more.
The complaint to the PMO is based entirely on audio recordings that Uppal claims to have acquired from former Essar employee Albasit Khan, who was employed with the group for over a decade as its security head.
Uppal claims that Khan tapped phones on the direction of Prashant Ruia and Ravikant Ruia, the owners of the multi-national conglomerate, Essar.
Khan has since distanced himself from Suren Uppal, saying he had never hired the lawyer to represent him and that the whole story was “concocted” for extortion. Khan’s stance was revealed in an email to Uppal which was forwarded by an Essar spokesperson to The Indian Express.
Claiming that the Essar group has now “won over” Khan, Uppal responded:
Interestingly, Khan is now denying that he carried out the illegal surveillance, claiming to have received the tapes from a Mumbai Police officer, according to a Mumbai Mirror report.
The report, quoting a retired Mumbai police officer who now works for Essar’s vigilance department, suggests that Khan was a Mumbai Police informer working for Vijay Salaskar. Salaskar was killed in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks.
The conversations were tapped between 2001 and 2006 (The Indian Express) from the ground floor and basement of Essar House in Mumbai and from the company’s guesthouse in Delhi (Outlook).
The conversations were allegedly recorded by tapping into the erstwhile BPL and Hutch servers.
The Quint has accessed Essar Group’s response to Uppal on 17 March 2016, in which they have outrightly denied all allegations as “false” and “extortionist in nature”.
Meanwhile, RIL expressed its “shock” at the reports that suggest they “have been victims of unauthorised and illegal tapping of our telephones.”
Assuring their cooperation, RIL in its statement has requested that the authorities look into the matter and “verify the truth of these allegations and take action against these malicious falsehoods.”
The JD(U) and CPI said it would raise the issue in the Parliament if the government doesn’t make it’s position clear.
The Congress, meanwhile, demanded that the tapes be made public as the people would be the ‘best judge’.
AAP spokesperson Ashutosh said the issue was more important than the Nira Radia tape controversy and urged the PM to order a proper investigation into the matter and make the tapes public.
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