The Supreme Court on Thursday constituted a team of CBI and income taxofficials to scan transcripts of 5,831 intercepted telephone conversations of former corporate lobbyist Niira Radia with politicians, industrialists and others to segregate those with criminality from innocuous ones.

A bench of Justices G S Singhvi and S J Mukhopadhaya formed the six-member team with five nominees from the CBI and one from the I-T department, and asked them to go through the entire transcripts running into 49 volumes and submit a report to the court in four months.

However, it appeared to separate the issue of scanning the Radia tapes for criminality from former Tata group chief Ratan Tata's petition on right to privacy. Immediately after the controversial Radia tapes hit the headlines, Tata had moved the court seeking a direction for ban on publication of private conversations but without any objection to a discreet investigation into those which could not be passed off as innocuous.

The bench said it would in hear the petitions filed by Tata and NGO 'Centre for Public Interest Litigation' in the second week of April. Tata had sought protection of privacy and a ban on publication of private conversations while the NGO had requested the court to make public those conversations reflecting the conspiracy to commit an offence.

The court made a deputy inspector general (DIG) rank CBI officer the in-charge of the team's work and said superintendent of police Vivek Priyadarshi, who along with Suresh Palsania had investigated the 2G scam under apex court's supervision, would coordinate.

On February 8, the bench had said that it had gone through a few transcripts of Radia's intercepted conversations and had found elements of criminality in some. It wanted segregation of innocuous and private conversations from those with criminality taint.

However, the bench was clear that scrutiny had to be done efficiently but discreetly to avoid mudslinging in public which could harm the reputation of individuals. "We do not want any mudslinging. The exercise should be confined to detecting those conversations which have criminality or affect national security," it had said.

It had further said, "There will be those which are purely private conversations. But there will also be those which are neither personal nor there is any criminality but still need to be looked into. Once criminality is found, it will go before the competent court. But purely private conversations will have to be deleted and all records destroyed."

The Radia tapes — a cache of chatter including conversations among corporate lobbyists, politicians and others — were recorded by the income tax department between August 2008 and July 2009, causing a sensation when they made their way to the media, with many citing the contents as illustrating the growing corporate influence on policymaking.

The I-T department had intercepted Radia's telephones after the finance ministry received a complaint against her. The department got the home ministry's permission to intercept her telephones for 120 days beginning August 20, 2008. It secured a fresh nod in May 2009 for an identical period.

A joint affidavit filed by the ministries of home and finance and the I-T department in the apex court had said, "A complaint was received by the finance minister in 2007, alleging that Radia had built up an empire of Rs 300 crore and that she was an agent of foreign intelligence agencies indulging in anti-national activities." On this complaint, it was directed that the matter be examined, they had said. (Times of India)