Metro Dairy disinvestment: Supreme Court of India upholds Calcutta HC decision to not initiate probe

The Division Bench of the Supreme Court of India on Friday has upheld the Calcutta court decision to not initiate a hunt into the disinvestment of Metro Dairy by the Trinamool Congress-led province government.

This petition, which came before the highest court in kind of application was filed by the state Congress President and MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury.

The Bench comprising Justice M.R. Shah and Justice Krishna Murari refused to entertain the special leave petition.

Senior Advocate Maninder Singh who appeared on behalf of the appellant held that no interference with the state supreme court order was warranted.

The Calcutta state supreme court had dismissed a PIL by Chowdhury in June 2022, which urged the Court for guiding a pursuit by the Central Bureau of Investigation into the disinvestment of Metro Dairy.

Metro Dairy was established in 1991 as a public-private venture, where 47 percent of stake was held by with the state-run province Milk Producers Federation, the ten percent shares were controlled by the National Dairy Development Board, whereas the remaining shares were vested during a private company, Keventer Agro.

After the exit of the Central board in 2014, Keventer Agro acquired the central board’s shares furthermore. In August 2017, the govt of West Bengal approved the sale of all of its stake to the project’s sole private partner for around Rs. 85 crores.

Now the Keventer Agro transferred 15% of its shares to a Singapore-based firm, Mandala Capital, for around Rs. 135 crores within a matter of few weeks.

This decision of Mamata Banerjee led cabinet was hugely criticised by the members of the opposition parties.

The petitioner too was critical of this decision.The petitioner is that the leader of the Indian National Congress within the 17th Lok Sabha and currently the president of the province Pradesh Congress Committee.

The petitioner had earlier moved to the Calcutta supreme court, highlighting that the government, which had founded Metro Dairy with public money, had suffered a loss of ‘at least Rs. 500 crores’ by selling its stakes.

The petition, talked about evil and prayed that this transaction should be examined by some agency because it lacked transparency.

Chief Justice Prakash Shrivastava and Justice Rajarshi Bharadwaj rejected the petitioner’s contentions and held that the choice of the province government to conclude the transaction within the manner it to conclude the transaction within the manner it did was ‘neither illegal nor arbitrary’.

The bench said the sole thing that has to be seen is that the if the correct procedure been followed within the case and if the reserve price was arbitrarily low and on the face of it, unacceptable.

The judgement read, ‘We find that policy decision of the State to sell 47% shares of Respondent No. 5, MDL, was neither illegal nor arbitrary and State had also not adopted non-transparent or opaque procedure available of shares, hence no case for interference within the present writ petition is created out which is accordingly, dismissed.’

Aggrieved by this order, the petitioner approached the Supreme Court.