Suspended IAS officer withdraws bail plea

NEW DELHI - Suspended senior IAS officer Ravi Inder Singh, accused of allegedly leaking sensitive information from the union home ministry to unauthorised persons, Friday withdraw his bail application at the Delhi High Court.

Justice Hema Kholi allowed the withdrawal of the bail application.

Earlier, Singh sought bail on the ground that the Delhi Police was unable to file the chargesheet within the stipulated 60 days. However, the police filed the chargesheet a day before Singh was to complete 60 days in judicial custody.

“He may have got bail on merit ground if the police had failed to file the chargesheet,” said the defence counsel.

The Delhi Police special cell filed the chargesheet in the court of Special Judge Sangeeta Dhingra Sehgal Jan 22, who took it into the records and fixed Jan 29 for the next date of hearing.

Police, which recently got the nod to file the chargesheet against Singh and the co-accused Vineet Kumar, CMD of Kolkata-based Temptation Food, sought their prosecution under various provisions dealing with criminal conspiracy, destruction of evidence and bribing of a government official.

“The chargesheet contained the transcripts of the recorded conversations of Singh and co-accused Kumar, police said.

The police have named 45 people as prosecution witnesses.

The chargesheet claimed that as many as 12,000 calls of the accused were intercepted and the IAS officer was using code words like “software” for flesh trade and “hardware” for accommodation, which he sought as benefits for the job he did.

Singh, who was drector of internal security at the home ministry, along with Kumar, who was allegedly acting as a middleman, was arrested by Delhi Police’s Special Cell Nov 23, 2010.

Instead of government accommodation, Singh had chosen to stay in a private guesthouse and the monthly rent of Rs.50,000 was being paid by Vineet Kumar’s company ever since the officer moved to New Delhi from Kolkata last year, police said.

Kumar obliged the officer as he wanted in return information about security clearance of a file relating to UK-based Telcordia Technologies, police alleged.

He was also accused of acting at the behest of a US-based telecom company to procure information relating to some files, they said.

In addition to corruption charges, police have accused Singh of forgery for the purpose of cheating and using forged documents, causing disappearance of evidence and criminal conspiracy.