Corporate espionage case
New Delhi: The corporate espionage case on Thursday reached the doorstep of Environment Ministry as a high ranking official’s personal secretary was among two persons arrested by the police here today.
“Jitender Nagpal, PS to Joint Secretary in Forest and Environment ministry and Vipan Kumar, PA to a UPSC member were arrested,” Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime), Ravindra Yadav said. A total of 16 people have been arrested in connection with the two FIRs by the Crime Branch so far.
The two arrests today are in connection with the second FIR in which five people were named earlier including Lokesh Sharma, an energy consultant who was apprehended on Monday by the Crime Branch busting the second module in the corporate espionage case. Vipan was earlier posted at Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and he was getting secret documents with the help of his contacts mainly from there which were provided to Lokesh, who is an employee of a Noida-based energy consultancy Infraline Energy.
“Nagpal is a resident of west Delhi’s Hari Nagar area and he too was connected to Lokesh Sharma,” he added. Sources said that the names of these two cropped up during the questioning of Lokesh following which they were picked up. Once police recovered evidence against the two, they were arrested late last night. Cracking down on a suspected case of corporate espionage, Delhi Police had on last Thursday arrested two junior Oil Ministry officials and three other middlemen for allegedly leaking classified government documents to energy companies.
On Friday, two energy consultants Santanu Saikia and Prayas Jain and five senior executives from top energy firms identified as Shailesh Saxena from RIL, Vinay Kumar from Essar, KK Naik from Cairns, Subhash Chandra from Jubilant Energy and Rishi Anand from ADAG Reliance were arrested.
Virendra Kumar, a casual worker in the Defence Ministry, was arrested on Tuesday for allegedly providing forged identity card to a key accused in the first FIR in which documents were leaked from the Petroleum Ministry. (PTI)