Zeenews Bureau
New Delhi: The Supreme Court, Tuesday, lifted the stay imposed by it on impeachment proceedings initiated against Sikkim High Court Chief Justice PD Dinakaran for alleged corrupt practices and misconduct.
Dismissing his plea for quashing the charges framed against him by a probe committee, the apex court bench of Justices G S Singhvi and C K Prasad pulled up Dinakaran and termed his petition seeking further stay on the impeachment proceeding as “motivated”.
The charges against the judge include land grabbing, accumulation of unaccounted assets, passing judicial order for extraneous considerations, following which his elevation to the Supreme Court was also stalled.
Importantly, the court also asked Rajya Sabha Chairman Hamid Ansari to reconstitute the three-member probe committee by replacing senior advocate PP Rao with another jurist - Dinakaran had expressed apprehension about a biased inquiry due to Rao`s presence in the panel and also that the committee had exceeded its jurisdiction.
Ansari had in January 2010 constituted a three-member panel comprising Supreme Court judge Justice Aftab Alam, Karnataka High Court Chief Justice J S Khehar and Rao to examine the 12 charges framed in the notice of motion adopted by the Karnataka Assembly.
Justice Dinakaran had challenged the proceedings on the ground that the panel had framed additional charges and was also independently conducting investigations and collecting material against him which, according to the judge, was not permissible under law.
