New Delhi: Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Usman Balwa on Monday moved a special court seeking its permission to withdraw the answers given by him earlier in response to the court's query in the ongoing trial in 2G spectrum allocation case.
Balwa, who had on May 10 faced court's ire which had said that he "deserved" to be taken in custody for his misconduct, filed a plea before Special CBI Judge OP Saini contending he will "not raise any question of prejudice caused to him on the ground of non-understanding of any questions" asked by the court.
The 2G case accused also requested the court to take on record the written answers afresh. He said that during recording of his statement, which was deferred by the judge, all the questions were "explained properly" by the court and due to "some inadvertence" it was recorded in some questions that he was not able to understand some of the queries.
"This was a bonafide mistake and the same was neither intentional nor deliberate but only due to an inadvertent error of recording the answers on the court's computer," he said. CBI, however, sought some time to file its reply after which the court fixed the matter for May 16. In his plea, Balwa said that he had understood the court's queries and he required no further clarification on it.
The judge had earlier said that Balwa had "embarrassed" him a lot due to his conduct and if he has not understood the question, then why he has given answers of the questions which were asked by the court during recording of his statement.
"It is an exercise to trap the court," the judge had said, adding, "Be ready to go to jail." Special public prosecutor UU Lalit had told the court that Balwa's contention that he did not understand questions asked by the court under the provisions of the CrPC was only to take advantage in future.
However, Balwa had apologised to the judge, saying he had not done anything intentionally and it was done only due to inadvertence. The judge had earlier also pulled up Balwa, saying certain answers given by him in response to the court's queries were "objectionable". He had said there were some errors in his statement and it had escaped the court's attention as they were "quite longish".
The stage for the recording of evidence of former Telecom Minister A Raja and 16 other accused, including DMK MP Kanimozhi, was set earlier when the court had supplied a draft questionnaire containing 1,718 questions running into 824 pages to the accused. Besides Raja and Kanimozhi, former Telecom Secretary Siddharth Behura, Raja's erstwhile private secretary RK Chandolia, Shahid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka, Unitech Ltd MD Sanjay Chandra, Reliance ADAG executives--Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara and Hari Nair--are facing trial in the case.
Directors of Kusegaon Fruits and Vegetables Pvt Ltd Asif Balwa and Rajiv Agarwal, Sharad Kumar and Bollywood producer Karim Morani are also accused in the case. Besides these 14 accused, three telecom firms Swan Telecom Pvt Ltd, Reliance Telecom Ltd and Unitech Wireless (Tamil Nadu) Ltd are also facing trial in the case.
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