Blaming former Minister for Youth and Sports Affairs M S Gill,Suresh Kalmadi today pleaded innocence before a Special CBI Court on the charge of entering a criminal conspiracy to cheat the government in the award of a Commonwealth Games-related contract. The decision to award the Timing-Scoring-Result (TSR) system contract to Swiss Timing was taken by the Ministry of Youth and Sports Affairs. But then minister Gill or ministry officials have not been examined or interrogated so far, his counsel Hitesh Jain and Amit Desai submitted before Special Judge Talwant Singh. The CBI produced Kalmadi and the two other OC officials arrested along with him,former Deputy Director General (Procurement) Surjeet Lal and then Joint Director General (Sport) A S V Prasad,before the court,seeking 14-day custody. However,the court allowed them custody for eight days till May 4. Yesterday,the CBI called him (Kalmadi) to its headquarters to interrogate on the TSR-system related issues,and the arrest was also shown to be made on the issue,but the agency did not ask anything on that, said Kalmadis counsel. The CBI had arrested former CWG Organising Committee chief Kalmadi and the two others for awarding illegal contracts to Swiss Timing for TSR system for the Games,causing a loss of Rs 95 crore to the exchequer. The trio have been booked under Section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) and Section 420 (cheating) of the IPC and various provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act. The accused,by abusing their official position,awarded the contract to Swiss Timing Ltd for Rs 107 crore in a most wrongful manner,restricting/eliminating all competition,and thereby caused huge wrongful loss to the government and corresponding wrongful gain to Swiss Timing Ltd, said the CBI. Kalmadi,Prasad and Lal were among the main functionaries and key personnel in OC and were deeply involved in instrumental allotment of TSR contract to Swiss Timing in a preplanned and premeditated manner at exorbitant rates, the agency alleged. The CBI also said: The behaviour of the accused has remained evasive and non-cooperative and they are not revealing the true facts and circumstances of the criminal conspiracy which led to the award of contract in a wrongful manner. Drawing attention to the fact that while the CBI claimed that the arrests of the three accused were made around 4.30 pm on Monday,news channels had confirmed the arrests at 11.30 am,the defence counsel also argued that the trio should be released as they were produced before the court after the stipulated 24 hours. Kalmadis arrest has come weeks after his close aide and OC Secretary General Lalit Bhanot and Director General V K Verma were taken into custody in the same case. The case against Verma and Bhanot was registered on November 29,2010.
