The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has submitted a closure report in an alleged case of corruption during the tenure of Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar faction) leader Praful Patel as Civil Aviation Minister in the UPA-II regime. The agency registered the case in May 2017 following a Supreme Court order.
The CBI filed the report before a designated special court, which is expected to take up the matter on April 15. About a month ago, the NCP (Ajit Pawar faction) had announced that it was nominating Mr. Patel as its candidate for the Rajya Sabha polls.
The case had been registered against unknown officials of the Civil Aviation Ministry, National Aviation Corporation of India Limited (NACIL), Air India and private companies. It alleged that a large number of aircraft were leased by Air India without a proper route study and marketing or price strategy. Also, they were leased even while an aircraft acquisition programme was under way.
Futile leasing
The leasing was done by the Ministry and NACIL officials purportedly, despite the firm’s airliners flying on very low load due to the largescale aircraft acquisition and several flights, especially overseas ones, running almost empty at a huge loss. The case alleged that standard lease agreement drafts adopted for taking the aircraft on lease did not have an early termination clause. It was also alleged that 15 expensive aircraft were taken on lease, even though there were not enough pilots.
The Parliamentary Committee on Transport, Tourism, and Culture in its report dated January 21, 2010, and the Committee on Public Undertakings in its report dated March 12, 2010, had severely criticised the Ministry’s decision to continue leasing and renewing lease agreements on various pretexts.
“Air India with a view to benefit private parties dry leased four Boeing 777s for five years in 2006. This while it was expecting delivery of its own aircraft from July 2007 onwards. As a result, five Boeing 777s and five Boeing 737s were kept idle on the ground at an estimated loss of ₹840 crore from 2007-09,” the First Information Report (FIR) had alleged.
On the Supreme Court’s directions, the CBI registered two more FIRs against unknown public servants and private persons. They involved the charges of irregularities in purchase orders for 111 aircraft worth about ₹70,000 crore, including 43 from Airbus and 68 from Boeing, and giving up of profit-making domestic and international routes belonging to Air India.
As alleged, the decisions benefited foreign aircraft manufacturers and private domestic/international airlines. For the purchases loans were taken from banks in the US and India, causing losses to the erstwhile national airlines.
The third case had alleged that Air India had withdrawn its services from international routes like Kolkata-Bangkok, Kolkata-Dhaka, Doha-Cochin, Cochin-Kuwait and domestic routes like Ahmedabad-Jaipur, Ahmedabad-Bangalore, Bangalore-Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar-Kolkata, Mumbai-Vadodara, Hyderabad-Nagpur, Mumbai-Patna, Mumbai-Pune, and Pune-Goa. “On all these routes private airlines namely Jet Airways, Kingfisher Airlines, Go Air, Indigo, Spicejet, Paramount Airways etc. started operating and made profits,” it had alleged.
“The two other cases are currently under investigation”
