Attorney General Of India Quotes

Meanwhile, in London, the Company directors were beginning to realise for the first time how powerful they were. In 1693, less than a century after its foundation, the Company was discovered to be using its own shares for buying the favours of parliamentarians, as it annually shelled out £1,200 a year to prominent MPs and ministers. The bribery, it turned out, went as high as the Solicitor General, who received £218, and the Attorney General, who received £545.** The parliamentary investigation into this, the world’s first corporate lobbying scandal, found the EIC guilty of bribery and insider trading and led to the impeachment of the Lord President of the Council and the imprisonment of the Company’s Governor.

This was an extraordinary exercise of judicial power, to say the least. Apart from the meager settlement of the civil claim, criminal proceedings arising out of the disaster, wherever they may be pending, would stand quashed. What was surprising was that five Supreme Court judges, the learned attorney general of India, others taking daily interest in the litigation, and the press, which gets terribly hot under the collar about lesser matters, did not object to this unusual settlement reeking of corruption. This settlement, agreed upon without consulting either the victims, the NGOs working for their welfare, or their well wishers has been characterized by Prof. Upen Baxi, India’s best scholar jurist, as an ‘unconscionable settlement’ by an unscrupulous Congress government.