ARUN KUMAR JAGATRAMKA Vs. UNION OF INDIA

JUDGEMENT

(1.) By way of this Letters Patent Appeal under Clause 15 of the Letters Patent, appellant- original applicant has challenged the legality and validity of the order passed by learned Single Judge in Civil Application No.2 of 2022 in Special Civil Application No.14430 of 2021 dtd. 6/7/2022.

(2.) Background of facts which has led to filing of this appeal is that applicant- original petitioner was facing an investigation into affairs of Gujarat NRE Coke Limited (GNCL) pursuant to an order dtd. 28/12/2018 passed by Deputy Director, Ministry of Company Affairs in view of Sec. 212(2)(c) of the Companies Act, 2013. In response to that, on 15/3/2019, respondent informed the Liquidator of GNCL that it had been directed by the Central Government to investigate into the affairs of GNCL under Sec. 212(1)(a) of the Companies Act, 2013. Subsequently, respondent through correspondence solicited information from Liquidator which was duly and promptly sent by Compliance Officer of GNCL and according to the appellant, all information regarding GNCL was provided by Liquidator. According to appellant, he has fully cooperated with the said process by sending information documents and relevant records which were within his control. Appellant has stated that with a view to ensure that investigation can be completed in a timely manner, he supplied annual reports, books of accounts, balance-sheets, etc., as stated in paragraph 2.4.

(3.) It has been further submitted that SFIO Team consisting of Officers mentioned in paragraph 2.5 also visited the premises of the company at 22 Camac Street, Kolkata from 26 th to 28/8/2009 and also from back-up of office by taking out Fact Server and hard-disks of laptops of various key employees having data volume of around 3 Trillion Bytes using their own Gazettes. Further, on 30/9/2019, Kolkata office of SFIO was handed 1 Trillion Byte External Hard Disc containing e-mail back- ups of all employees having data size of 816 GB.