Herald case: Court issues notices to Sonia, Rahul on Swamy''s plea for docs

New Delhi, August 27

A Delhi court has asked Congress president Sonia Gandhi and vice-president Rahul Gandhi to respond to BJP leader Subramanian Swamy application seeking some documents from the party and Associated Journals Ltd (AJL) in the National Herald case.

Besides the Gandhis, the others who received the notice were Congress leaders Motilal Vora and Oscar Fernandes, veteran journalist Suman Dubey and Sam Pitroda.

The respondents — all of them accused of financial misdealings — have been given two weeks’ time to reply. The court will now hear the case on October 4.

In his application, Swamy said he wanted documents relating to a loan extended by the Congress to AJL — the holding firm of former Congress mouthpiece the National Herald — he claimed were pertinent to the case.

He also wanted some documents that AJL filed in the Registrar of Companies (ROC) and some papers from the Department of Income Tax (DoT) in relation to income tax returns filed by the firm.

The documents sought from AJL included "authorisation by the members of the AJL to borrow monies in excess of its paid- up capital and free reserve of AJL, relevant extracts from the books of accounts of AJL during the period of loan and documents by which the loan was converted into shares in the books of AJL".

Swamy also wanted documents of the Congress from the year in which it “wrote off” the loan to the firm.

The new application comes more than a month after the Delhi High Court set aside a lower court’s order in which it asked the party and AJL to provide Swamy balance sheets for financial year 2010-11 and also asked the Finance Ministry and other government departments to provide the documents Swamy wanted.  

Swamy accused the suspects, among them Young Indian Pvt Ltd (YI) — a non-profit organisation  — of having embezzled funds. The paper — a Congress mouthpiece launched by Jawaharlal Nehru in 1930s — stopped publishing in 2008. — Agencies