Petro-gate: Jubilant Energy's Subhash Chandra gets bail

NEW DELHI: Jubilant Energy's official Subhash Chandra, who along with 12 others has been charge sheeted in the Petroleum ministry documents leak case, was today granted conditional bail by a Delhi court.

The court allowed his bail plea on furnishing of personal bond of Rs two lakh and a surety of like amount.

Additional Sessions Judge Raj Kapoor, while enlarging him on bail, imposed several conditions on Chandra including that he should not tamper with evidence and influence witnesses.

Chandra is the first person among the 13 accused to get bail in the case.

Earlier, Chandra's counsel had sought bail on the ground that as per the charge sheet, no secret documents have been recovered from the possession of his client, who has been in custody for over two months.

The defence counsel had also said that charge sheet has already been filed and no mobile phone or laptop of his client was seized by the police during investigation.

The crime branch of Delhi Police, however, had opposed the bail plea saying offence committed in the case was covered under the Official Secrets Act (OSA) and inquiry on this aspect was underway.

It had said that Chandra was in unauthorised possession of six sets of documents recovered from him.

"He (Chandra) was not authorised to possess any of these documents. He should not be having possession of any of these documents. These documents were not in public domain," the prosecutor had said.

He had also said that the offence under OSA was made out but it was not yet slapped and the enquiry was going on.

The court has already fixed May 5 for hearing arguments on bail pleas of four other corporate executives, one journalist and another co-accused in the case.

Besides Chandra, the bail pleas of Shailesh Saxena of Reliance Industries Ltd, Vinay Kumar of Essar, Rishi Anand of Reliance ADAG, Cairns India's K K Nayak, senior journalist Shantanu Saikia and one Virender, is pending before the sessions court.