A plea regarding alleged derailment of case proceedings of the trial court in the multicrore public distribution system (PDS) scam has made the Supreme Court seek a response from the Chhattisgarh government. SC has asked the state government, it’s Economic Offences Wing/Anti-Corruption Bureau and Special Investigation Team about the relocating the alleged Rs 36,000 crore scam outside Chhattisgarh.

The notice was issued by a three-judge bench of Justices R F Nariman, Navin Sinha, and Indira Banerjee to the respondents which also included some bureaucrats. The bench said, “Issue notice, returnable in four weeks, in the writ petition as also in the application for stay”.

 Girish Sharma, an employee of Chhattisgarh State Civil Supplies Corporation in Raipur, had in his plea stated that the state government is trying to derail the proceeding of the case in the trial court and has asked it to be transferred. “The petitioner is a crucial witness, in the multi-crore, Civil Supplies Scam, infamously known as NAN Scam and has been constrained to invoke the writ jurisdiction of this Court against malafide actions of the Respondent No. 1-State…has since Dec 2018 unrelentingly been making attempts to frustrate the trial,” the plea stated.

The petitioner’s counsel Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani and advocate Ravi Sharma, asked for the transfer of the trial case monitored by the apex court and also to restrain the Chhattisgarh government from taking coercive action against their counsel.  The case was registered against the officers of the Chhattisgarh State Civil Supplies Corporation and Chhattisgarh State Warehousing Corporation which were raided on February 12, 2015, by the Economic Offences Investigation (EOI) and Anti-corruption Bureau, Raipur, Chhattisgarh.

The Enforcement Directorate has also registered a money laundering case in connection with the scam against two IAS officers.