CBI is ready with its chargesheet against former judge

Two years after his arrest, the CBI is ready to chargesheet former High Court judge Shamit Mukherjee. Orders for the chargesheet are underst...

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Two years after his arrest, the CBI is ready to chargesheet former High Court judge Shamit Mukherjee. Orders for the chargesheet are understood to have been passed by CBI Director U S Mishra following the Government giving sanction to prosecute Subhash Sharma, former DDA Vice Chairman, and the principal accused in the 2003 DDA land scam case.

The chargesheet against the former judge—the first such action against a judge of the Delhi High Court—is expected to be filed within the next few days after it’s gone through several rounds of legal scrutiny.

It was in March 2003 that Mukherjee had been implicated in the DDA scam along with several others and had subsequently resigned from the High Court. His residence had been searched and he was also put under arrest.

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The CBI had made out a case of illegal gratification against him for delivering a ‘‘biased’’ order favouring builders involved in the scam. Telephone surveillance had provided leads about High Court case files being allegedly taken to a guest house where orders were dictated.

Following Mukherjee’s alleged involvement in the scam, the then CBI Director had briefed former High Court Chief Justice V N Khare and apprised him of the recovery of the files. Mukherjee had then denied the allegations and cited his wife’s poor health as reason for his resignation. CBI officials claim that while they had sufficient evidence—including telephone intercepts—to chargesheet Mukherjee, they had to wait a long time to obtain the sanction to chargesheet Subhash Sharma. That chargesheet was filed by the agency last week.

Ritu Sarin

Ritu Sarin is Executive Editor (News and Investigations) at The Indian Express group. Her areas of specialisation include internal security, money laundering and corruption. Sarin is one of India’s most renowned reporters and has a career in journalism of over four decades. She is a member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) since 1999 and since early 2023, a member of its Board of Directors. She has also been a founder member of the ICIJ Network Committee (INC). She has, to begin with, alone, and later led teams which have worked on ICIJ’s Offshore Leaks, Swiss Leaks, the Pulitzer Prize winning Panama Papers, Paradise Papers, Implant Files, Fincen Files, Pandora Papers, the Uber Files and Deforestation Inc. She has conducted investigative journalism workshops and addressed investigative journalism conferences with a specialisation on collaborative journalism in several countries. ... Read More