The Supreme Court on Monday said demand for a bribe by a public servant and its acceptance must be proved for establishing an offence under the Prevention of Corruption Act.
"The offence under Section 7 of the PC Act relating to public servants taking bribes requires a demand of illegal gratification and the acceptance thereof. The proof of demand of bribe by a public servant and its acceptance by him is sine quo non for establishing the offence," a bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and Abhay S Oka said.
The top court allowed an appeal filed by K Shanthamma, working as a commercial tax officer at Secunderabad at the relevant time, against the Telangana High Court's judgement, which affirmed her conviction for taking a bribe of Rs 2,000 from a supervisor of Farmers’ Service Co-operative Society for issuing a final assessment order.
The allegation against her was when she was offered the tainted currency notes of Rs 2,000 in her office, instead of taking the amount directly, she took out a diary from her table drawer and asked the complainant to keep the currency notes there. However, sleuths of Anti Corruption Bureau arrested her after recovering wads of currency notes, which were tallied with the numbers recorded in pre-trap proceedings.
However, after going through the case records and statements of witnesses, the top court noted this was a case where the demand for illegal gratification by the appellant was not proved by the prosecution.
It also found that the prosecution witnesses made improvements upon their statements about the demand which could not be accepted. It also noted another witness, who was working as assistant to the officer, was also not reliable as the appellant had served him a memo for being careless in performing duties.
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