Manmohan wants CBI court order struck down

Former prime minister of India Manmohan Singh hasmoved the Supreme Court against a special CBI court order summoning him as an accused in a coal scam case.The senior Congress leader also challenged the trial court’s December 2014 order for further probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation after the agency sought to close the case.Special CBI judge Bharat Parashar this month ordered Singh to appear before him on April 8 over accusations of criminal conspiracy and corruption in the allegedly illegal allocation of coal fields in Odisha.Singh’s petition asked for the special judge’s order to be struck down on the grounds that it was bad in law as it failed to fix any specific act of criminality on him. He argued that because there was no coal policy in 2005 when these fields were allocated to a leading Indian firm, he cannot be charged with favouritism and so the trial court proceedings should be stopped.In 2012, while Singh was PM, national auditor CAG said the government sold around 200 coal field leases to private steel, cement and power companies as well as some state-run firms at artificially low prices and the non-transparent process cost the exchequer about `1.86 lakh crore.