SC takes up hearing in cash-for-vote scam

HYDERABAD: The heat of the political battle playing out in Telangana was felt in the Supreme Court on Thursday when the latter took up the hearing in the ’Cash-for-Vote Scam’ case.
The bench of Justice SA Bobde and Justice L Nageswara Rao was hearing a plea filed by Telangana questioning the relief granted to Jerusalem Mathaiah by the Hyderabad High Court, which had quashed the case against him.The scam surfaced on May 31, 2015, with an explosive disclosure of an alleged conversation between Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and nominated MLA Elvis Stephenson of Telangana Assembly. The essence of the audio clip was that Stephenson should vote for the TDP nominee in the MLC elections then.
According to Telangana ACB, Mathaiah was the first man who contacted nominated MLA Elvis Stephenson to coax him to vote for TDP’s nominee for a price.
Later, A Revanth Reddy, who was with TDP then, met Stephenson and was caught red-handed offering a bribe of ₹50 lakh.
ACB, in its chargesheet, said this was only a part of the ₹5 crore that was promised to the nominated MLA. Since Stephenson and Mathaiah are Christians and Mathaiah was leading a Christian association, ACB culled out some links and said that TDP tried to influence Stephenson through its Christian cadre.
But HC did not find much merit in this and said there was no material to indict Mathaiah in the case. When the Telangana regime launched the case in May 2015 and made Mathaiah an accused, he went underground and surfaced in AP. The Telangana government, at that time, charged AP with providing shelter to the accused in the case. But now Mathaiah is charging both AP and Telangana regimes with ganging up against him and has sought a CBI probe into the matter as well as police protection.
The SC bench directed Telangana DGP to listen to Mathaiah for assessing the threat perception. The bench also appointed Sidhartha Dave as counsel for Mathaia as he was claiming that he has no money to fight this case.
Meanwhile, R Udaya Simha, another accused in the scam, filed a plea urging the apex court to implead him in the case so that he would have an opportunity to place his views at an appropriate time.
Telangana opposed this plea, describing it as another move by the accused to further delay the hearing. Appearing for Telangana, senior counsel Harin Raval said the accused were purposefully delaying the matter by filing such pleas.
Appearing for Udaya Simha, senior counsel Sidhartha Luthra refuted these allegations and said that the accused cannot be denied the opportunity of availing the legal remedies available to him. So heated were the arguments that at one stage the bench had to ask them to calm down. The case was posted to January 29, 2019.