Opinion of 3 ex-Chief Justices used by Cong in FCRA case

The three former Chief Justices, AM Ahmadi, YV Chandrachud and PN Bhagwati, as well as former Attorney General G Ramaswamy, have given a unanimous opinion that the donations do not fall under the ambit of the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act (FCRA) of 1976 since the donors aren’t foreign companies.

The case against the Congress goes back to April this year when the Income- Tax Department threatened to strip the party of its special exemption under Section 13(A) of the Income Tax Act for receiving the donations between December 1993 and April 1995.

Moreover, the party was threatened with penalties amounting to Rs 20 crore. Later, a freelance journalist from Bihar, Madhuresh, filed a Public Interest Litigation on the donations in the Delhi High Court.

The opinion notes submitted by the party, available with The Indian Express, neither name the Congress nor the donors directly. Only Ahmadi’s note identifies an advocate named Ranjit Kumar as the one who sought his opinion. When contacted, Kumar said he would not like to name the solicitor who approached him to get Ahmadi’s opinion since it was “privileged opinion.”

He said: “The only thing I would like to say is that the legal luminaries have addressed only very specific law points.”

Justice Ahmadi refused to elaborate further or name the client on whose behalf his opinion had been sought. Only one of the former Chief Justices, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “It is certainly not the Congress party which has asked for the opinion. And the name of the donor was not disclosed.”

When contacted in Bombay, former Chief Justice Y V Chandrachud also did not identify who approached him. “I do not remember who had come for the opinion since so many months have passed. Some solicitor must have come,” he said. Ramaswamy gave a similar reply: “The opinion was sought by some solicitor from Calcutta.”

Senior Congress leaders handling the FCRA case admit that the former Chief Justices were approached by the donors and that the opinions have now been annexed as part of the party’s reply to the Home Ministry. A former Union Minister said that the strong body of legal opinion was aimed at buttressing the case and finding what he described as the “escape route” in the FCRA case.

He indicated that besides the opinion, chartered accountant certificates of four companies had also been submitted by them. The chartered accountants had certified that Non Resident Indians held more than 51 per cent of the shares in the companies and that the donors did not have any offices or establishments in India.

Thus, the party has for the first time been able to persuade the donor companies to come into the picture and give proof of their share-holdings to the Government. The companies had earlier been identified as the Decor Trading Ltd., located in Antigua & Barbados; the Diera Trading Corporation, also located in Antigua & Barbados, and the Dominion Trading Ltd, located in the Isle of Mann. Earlier, the Congress had told the Union Home Ministry that the money had been deposited by them in their accounts due to an “unintentional and administrative oversight.”

Congress leaders claim that by marshalling these documents, Congress President Sitaram Kesri has found a solution to what earlier seemed an intractable problem. Part two of their strategy is to point out that the onus of explaining how and for what purpose the donations were received did not rest with Kesri but with his predecessor former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao.

Kesri has told more than one confidant that he was away in Houston for medical treatment when a majority of the donations were received and that it was Rao who had received the cheques.

A total of eight donations were made, three in the name of AICC Treasurer and five directly to the AICC. It is because of this, party leaders say, that Rao has been sent more than one letter asking for details of the donations. No reply is said to have come from him so far.