HYDERABAD: Stating that it was unfair to harass ‘genuine industrialists’ with criminal cases, Hetero Drugs and its director M Srinivas Reddy on Friday urged the Telangana high court to quash the case filed against them by the CBI in the quid pro quo case. They were named as accused in one of the 11 chargesheets the CBI had filed in the case.
Justice Shameem Akther was hearing the quash petition filed by the Hetero group and its director.
Appearing for the Hetero group, senior counsel T Niranjan Reddy said the quid pro quo case was more of a political case. “If the son of a chief minister is launching a business, then people tend to invest in them. That is a natural tendency. What is unnatural in this case is the attitude of the CBI that made all those who invested even Rs 100 as accused,” he alleged. “Whether the liability of a political heir-cum-businessman can be extended to all the investors is a question that has to be examined by the courts,” he said. “They want to prosecute Jagan Mohan Reddy and hence filed several chargesheets and started making everyone an accused in the process,” Niranjan Reddy said.
CBI counsel K Surender said the CBI will not go by the political overtones attached to a case. “It looks like a decision of the company, but what one should observe is it is the intent of the MD that comes across as a decision of the company in almost all cases,” he said. The modus operandi applied in all the 11 chargesheets in the quid pro quo case was the same, he said.
At this, Justice Akther said that he would start resolving all the cases filed in the quid pro quo case and adjourned the hearing to three weeks.
Hetero group said: “The only allegation against us is that we got 75 acres of land from the state at Jadcherla pharma SEZ. This was not a sale. We were given this land on a lease and we developed the land on our own. It cost us more than Rs 20 lakh per acre. It is absurd to link this allotment with our Rs 20 crore investment made in Jagan’s firms — Jagathi Publications and Janani Infra.”
“If deriving more benefit from our investment is the logic behind the quid pro quo case, then we invested far more than what we have derived from our investment,” the group and the director said, asserting that the CBI’s case defied logic.
