Preseident Pratibha Patil asked her office to find out how and why NRI hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal had made it to the Padma Bhushan list given the controversy around his discharge in bank fraud cases, says a report in The Indian Express.
And she signed on the dotted line only after the Government said that his name could be “deleted” if any adverse finding surfaced before the ceremony in March.
Sources said that Patil questioned Chatwal's nomination after The Sunday Express reported, on January 24, that the hotelier, once under CBI probe for alleged bank fraud, was a Padma nominee.
Patil is said to have asked her Secretary, Christy Fernandez, to check with the Government on his inclusion. Fernandez, sources said, called up Home Secretary G K Pillai who told him that the CBI had taken a decision not to appeal against his discharge in the bank fraud cases.
Pillai is also said to have added that if any charge came up against Chatwal on review, there was a provision in the Padma awards process to “delete” his name before the ceremony. Fernandez, sources said, put this on record before getting the President's assent.
When asked about the query from Rashtrapati Bhavan, Pillai did not comment but said that there was “no such noting” on the file. He said that both CBI and IB had given a clean chit to Chatwal. “We base ourselves on record and not on hypothetical assumptions,” he said. “There is no question of a review but if tomorrow Chatwal commits murder, we will definitely reconsider our decision.”
On January 27, the Home Ministry issued a statement that “as per available reports, there is nothing adverse on record against Chatwal.” It said that between 1992 and 1994, the CBI registered five cases against Chatwal and some bank officials for “conniving with the intention to defraud” Bank of Baroda and Bank of India. “Three of these cases were closed by CBI itself while chargesheets were filed by the CBI in two cases before the Court of Special Judge...In these two cases also, the Court discharged Chatwal.”
As The Indian Express reported, while top CBI investigators were for filing the appeal, the Director of Prosecution opposed it and two CBI directors Vijay Shankar and Ashwani Kumar endorsed the DoP's decision.
Chatwal's nomination, as reported by this newspaper today, was also backed by written recommendations from Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel and Minister for Overseas Indian Affairs Vayalar Ravi as well as from two US nationals.
These include Joseph Crowley, a prominent Democrat member of the India-US caucus and member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs who visited India for the wedding of Chatwal's son, Vikram, in 2006. And Dalis Adler, a staff associate at the House Foreign Affairs Committee, who was formerly working for Democrat Gary Ackerman.
Ackerman, incidentally, took Chatwal as his guest to the Obama White House dinner for visiting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh late last year.
