Team Herald
PANJIM: Former chief minister Digambar Kamat was grilled for nearly an hour at the Crime Branch (CB) office on Monday, two days before the special court is slated to pronounce its verdict on his anticipatory bail plea.
His close aide and Margao Municipal Council chairperson Arthur D’Silva was questioned for about half an hour even as he applied for anticipatory bail fearing arrest for the offence under Section 201 (destruction of evidence) of the Indian Penal Code.
CB on Sunday had added this against Kamat, D’Silva and JICA surveyor Uday Mandevalkar, to the existing FIR originally registered against ‘some minister and Louis Berger officials.’
D’Silva was summoned at 12-noon but he appeared only after 3.30 pm. He denied all the charges levelled by CB claiming, “whatever papers were given to me by ex-CM (Kamat), I submitted to CB.”
He admitted to journalists that he has moved for anticipatory bail on the advice from a ‘friend’. The plea is slated to come up for hearing on Tuesday. He smiled when asked whether the friend was Kamat.
Kamat appeared at 4.03pm and left at about 8 pm. However, he was questioned only for an hour – from 7 to 8 pm – as investigating officer Dattaguru Sawant was in the special court with other case-related applications and investigations. The former CM declined to reply to any media queries.
Mandevalkar has been booked for submitting misleading and wrong information under the Right To Information Act in his capacity as JICA Public Information Officer, while D’Silva is charged with pressurizing JICA officials for giving wrong information ‘for screening the offender Kamat’.
“D’Silva pressurized the PIO to give a tailor-made reply. He did not even have authorization from Kamat to collect the RTI, which is mandatory. As per the rules the applicant or his written authorised agent has to collect the reply,” an officer had told Herald.
