The Supreme Court on Monday has dismissed a PIL refusing the plea for seeking fresh investigations,into the procurement deal of the Rafale fighter jets .
This public interest litigation was filed after the allegation of Dassault Aviation having paid an Indian middleman millions of euros to influence the deal, was reported by a French portal last year.
The plea was filed by Manohar Lal Sharma, an advocate, sought the court’s directions to quash the agreement to procure 36 fighter jets from the French aircraft maker.
A bench comprising Chief Justice Uday Umesh Lalit and S Ravindra Bhat considered lawyer M L Sharma’s submission that a direction for issuing a letters rogatory to gather new evidence pertaining to the agreement.
When the matter was called out for hearing, Advocate ML Sharma apprised the bench the facts of the case and said, “If the French probe agency says 1 billion euro was paid as bribe then we need to see those papers and thus LRs are needed.Please issue this. I don’t have any personal agenda in this.”
Letter Rogatory are letters issued to foreign courts or governments seeking their assistance in a given case. The bench however seemed unimpressed by his contentions and said it cannot entertain his plea under Article 32 of the Constitution of India.
The new PIL was not given a hearing by the bench. Sharma then made the decision to drop the PIL.
ML Sharma in his plea has asked to quash the Rafale deal, under which the Central government has procured 36 fighter jets from French aviation firm Dassault. In his plea he claims that the deal was an outcome of corruption and is in gross violation of Articles 13, 21, and 253 of the Constitution of India.
He had also sought a probe by the CBI under provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act against the Prime Minister and other respondents.
On December 14, 2018, the Supreme Court dismissed a number of PILs contesting the agreement between India and France to buy 36 Rafale planes, stating that there was no reason to “seriously dispute the decision-making process” that would have called for the contract to be annulled.
A total of four petitions had been filed then , which questioned the Indian government’s deal with French firm Dassault Aviation to buy 36 fighter jets for a total of Rs. 58,000 crore. There were six petitioners in all – ML Sharma, Vineet Dhanda, Sanjay Singh, Yashwant Sinha, Arun Shourie and Prashant Bhushan.
Subsequently, in 2019 the review petitions against the same were also dismissed.