Jaitley said Parakh was only a “recommending authority” but has been named as an accused in the FIR. “The automatic corollary of this has to be that the minister in charge, who was the Prime Minister, cannot be kept out. He is the competent authority.”
The FIR has named Parakh and Birla for criminal conspiracy and under provisions of the Prevention of Corruption Act in the allocation of two coal blocks in Odisha in 2005.
Jaitley described Birla as “one of the doyens of the industry” and Parakh as an “an honest civil servant” who as a “dissenter” in the coal bloc allocation had recommended auction of coal.
