Metro Dairy disinvestment: Adhir Chowdhury to approach SC for CBI probe

Kolkata, June 30 (SocialNews.XYZ) Congress' West Bengal chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury on Thursday said that he would approach the Supreme Court against the Calcutta High Court order, ruling out a CBI probe into the state government's disinvestment of its stake in erstwhile joint venture Metro Dairy Ltd.

On June 13, the high court's division bench of Chief Justice Prakash Srivastava and Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj observed that since the state government did not adopt any opaque sale of shares, there was no need for any intervention by the court in the process. It also observed that the disinvestment process was neither arbitrary nor illegal.

Not happy with the ruling, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury has now decided to approach the apex court.

Chowdhury's counsel, P.K. Chattopadhyay said that that the state government in 2017 sold its 47 per cent stake to private entity Keventer Group at a throwaway price of just Rs 85 crore and in the same year, Keventer Group sold 15 percent of this to a Singapore-based entity for Rs 135 crore.

"Without any vested interest the state government would never have divested its stake in Metro Dairy at such a throwaway price. So, we wanted a CBI enquiry in the matter. But since the division bench of the Calcutta High Court did not approve that, we will be moving to the Supreme Court with the same demand," he said.

Senior Congress leader P. Chidambaram had appeared on behalf of Metro Dairy Ltd in the high court, but faced ire of a group of Congress-affiliated advocates when he came for the hearing.

Source: IANS