Former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair named in CBI chargesheet of Antrix-Devas case

New Delhi August 12:Former ISRO chairman G Madhavan Nair was named in a chargesheet filed by CBI Thursday in the ISRO-Devas case in which the investigating agency has alleged financial loss of Rs 578 crore to the exchequer. Nair was heading ISRO as well as its marketing arm, Antrix Corporation, in 2005 when Antrix signed a contract with Bangalore-based Devas Multimedia for lease of almost the entire transponder space on two satellites that ISRO planned to launch. Devas was also suppose to get 70 MHz of the 150 MHz spectrum in S-band that ISRO possessed.

The deal was cancelled in 2011 when ISRO was headed by Nair’s successor K Radhakrishnan.

The chargesheet, filed in the Delhi court of special judge Vinod Kumar, also named former executive director of Antrix, K R Sridhar Murthi, the then president and CEO of Devas Multimedia, Ramachandran Viswanathan, and some other officials of the private company. The court will take up the chargesheet for consideration on August 18.

Madhavan Nair, a Padma Vibhushan, said he was surprised to know about the chargesheet.

“Three inquiries have found nothing wrong in signing of the deal. Each one of them has said that there was no loss to the exchequer. Competent technical people were present in these team. I don’t understand on what basis has the CBI been making these claims. And incidentally, it is not probing why the deal was cancelled. It is the cancellation of the deal that is problematic and not the signing. International courts (of arbitration) have now ruled that the cancellation of the deal was illegal,” Nair told The Indian Express. He was referring to the two arbitration orders that have gone against ISRO and the Indian government in the case.

Nair was questioned by CBI in New Delhi earlier this year. He said there were a lot of “missing links” in the information and documents on which the CBI had built its case. “No wonder it is coming to these absurd conclusions. The papers have all been provided by Radhakrishnan when he was ISRO chairman. A process of finding a scapegoat is underway,” he said.

The former chairman, who was banned from taking up any public position by the government following the controversy, said the Devas episode seemed to be “taking the same course” as the infamous ISRO spy scandal of the 1990s in which a couple of ISRO scientists were accused of selling national secrets to a foreign country. No charges were proved in that case, and the main accused was declared not guilty in 1998.

Based on the CBI complaint, the Enforcement Directorate also registered a case against Devas Multimedia to investigate the flow of funds in the company under the Foreign Exchange Management Act, 1999 and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002.

Devas Multimedia, on its part, approached international courts to challenge the 2011 cancellation of the Antrix Devas deal by the UPA government.

A Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) tribunal at the Hague, which addresses disputes in agreements signed under the rules of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL), in a July 25, 2016 order held the Indian government liable to pay compensation to the tune of 40 per cent of investment made by Devas Multimedia’s foreign investors for cancelling the deal.

A tribunal of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris had in September 2015 awarded Devas Multimedia “damages and pre-award interest totaling $672 million’’ and “post-award interest accruing at 18% per annum on that sum until the award is fully paid”.