Corporate espionage case: Two accused sent to 5-day police custody

A Delhi court on Thursday allowed the Delhi Police five days custodial interrogation of two persons, arrested for allegedly procuring sensitive documents of ministries of Coal, Environment and Transport and others, in the corporate espionage case.

New Delhi: A Delhi court on Thursday allowed the Delhi Police five days custodial interrogation of two persons, arrested for allegedly procuring sensitive documents of ministries of Coal, Environment and Transport and others, in the corporate espionage case.

Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Satish Kumar Arora remanded Jitender Nagpal, PS to Joint Secretary in Forest and Environment Ministry and Vipan Kumar, PA to a UPSC member to police custody after the crime branch of Delhi Police sought their custodial interrogation.

Jitender and Vipan were arrested by the crime branch yesterday evening in connection with the second FIR in which five people were named earlier including Lokesh, an energy consultant who was arrested on February 20 by the Crime Branch busting the second module in the corporate espionage case.

During the hearing, the CMM asked the Investigating Officer as to what was their role in the case.

To this, the IO told the court that they were involved in procuring confidential papers and used to provide stolen documents to Lokesh.

"Various confidential documents related to ministries of Coal, Power, Environment and Transport have been recovered from them," the IO said while seeking police custody.

During the proceedings, the court noted that there was no counsel appearing for the accused.

On this, the court appointed advocate Sunil Parasher as Legal Aid Counsel to provide legal assistance to the duo.

Parasher informed the court that as he was not aware about the charges levelled against the accused he would require some time to go through the FIR after which the court remanded them to police custody.

The Delhi Police had on February 19 arrested two junior Oil Ministry officials and three other middlemen for allegedly leaking classified government documents to energy companies.

On February 20, two energy consultants Santanu Saikia and Prayas Jain and five senior executives from top energy firms-- Shailesh Saxena from RIL, Vinay Kumar from Essar, KK Naik from Cairns, Subhash Chandra from Jubilant Energy and Rishi Anand from ADAG Reliance--were arrested.

A total of 16 people have been arrested in connection with the two FIRs by the Crime Branch so far. 

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