Complaint filed over Appointment of Information Commissioner Omita Paul with CEC

Mumbai, March 7: Armed with documentary evidence received in several installments from DoPT, Mumbai RTI Activist Girish Mittal filed a formal complaint with Chief Central Election Commissioner Navin Kumar for breach of Model Code of Conduct during the Lok Sabha Elections held in 2009. The complaint, which was dispatched on Friday along with supporting documents, alleges that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, former Union Law Minister H R Bhardwaj, Minister of State Prithviraj Chauhan and many others knowingly carried out the entire process of proposing, selecting, appointing and swearing-in Ms Omita Paul as Information Commissioner at the time when the Code of Conduct was in force.

And it wasn’t only the politicians. “Many highly placed officials belonging to PMO, DoPT, Law Ministry and Rashtrapati Bhavan facilitated the above wrongdoing on an ongoing basis during the period of the Code of Conduct,” alleges Mittal.

Magsaysay-award winner Arvind Kejriwal inspected the files at DoPT on 25th January 2010 and unearthed many documents that were denied to Mittal. The complaint to the election commissioner is based on both these sets of RTI documents, meticulously collected over a 6-month period.

PRESS KIT:

Full text of complaint letter: http://www.box.net/shared/13lfm7il7h

Supporting documents sent (with added footnotes): http://www.box.net/shared/nt0n6p0vif

Girish Mittal’s mobile: 9323462428 Email: mittalgirish @ gmail.com

Warm Regards,

Krish

98215 88114