Pune: Justice (Retd.) Gita Mittal tells Delhi High Court that AITA, AITA Trust and DLTA are closely intertwined, seeks a forensic audit and access to documents relating to funding, land and finances.The Administrator for the All India Tennis Association (AITA) has appealed to the Delhi High Court to make AITA Trust (Trust) and the Delhi Lawn Tennis Association (DLTA) “respondents” to the ongoing case and appoint an “independent forensic auditor” to look into the “affairs of AITA and AITA Trust”, saying the “close relationship between the three entities needed to be probed for compliance and possible violation of laws and regulations”.Justice (Retired) Gita Mittal also sought directions to the ministries of sports and housing/urban development to make available all documents related to funding and assistance given to the trio, as well as deeds and approvals relating to the land on which the RK Khanna Stadium stands.Faced with resistance from AITA and the Trust in providing details of the latter’s registration, funding and functioning, Mittal has asked the two-judge bench to clarify that she was “entitled to seek and obtain … such documents (that) relate directly to the … institutional functioning of AITA”.Mittal said that, as per the Trust deed, AITA had “relinquished” all its rights and transferred all its “assets, revenues, contractual rights and financial interests” towards the corpus of the Trust, thus “abdicating its responsibility of development and management of the sport in India”.Further, the “objects of the Trust” were to provide, out of its revenue from the RK Khanna Stadium, “grants to AITA and the state associations for the promotion of the game of tennis”.Essentially, Mittal wrote, the Trust was performing the functions of the AITA itself.She pointed to a “commonality of office-bearers”, whereby the same set of persons held, or continued to hold, key positions in the three bodies, as well as a private limited company registered as ‘All India Tennis Association’.She underscored the fact that all three had their offices at the same address: the RK Khanna Stadium.As such, Mittal said that all the rights and revenue generated from the stadium were “those of AITA and must be accounted to it” and, therefore, the “supervision of the Trust is an inseparable part of the supervision over the affairs and finances of the AITA itself”.The former chief justice of the J&K High Court noted, through an exchange of letters between DLTA and the Trust, that at one point AITA, the Trust and DLTA were headed by the same person, Anil Khanna.According to the constitution of the Trust, as mentioned in its deed, it shall have a maximum of 30 trustees, with 21 of them permanent, including eight each from AITA and DLTA.With regard to the company, its directors included Anil Jain, former president of AITA and current president of the Trust; Rohit Rajpal, current president of DLTA and a vice-president in the AITA interim committee, who until the middle of this year was a trustee and treasurer of the Trust; and Aditya Khanna, son of Anil Khanna, who is one of the first board of permanent trustees of the Trust.Among others in the Trust are Anil Dhupar, secretary, and Hironmoy Chatterjee and Raktim Saikia, trustees. All three are currently vice-presidents in the AITA interim committee.While Dhupar argued that the Trust and its finances were not the subject matter of the present writ petition, Chintan Parikh, the AITA interim president, said that looking into the federation’s accounts was outside the purview of the Administrator.Mittal, however, cited the original order of April 27 this year, wherein Paragraph 43(x) directs her to “oversee all bank accounts”.She said that, as such, the refusal to share information on the Trust was “legally untenable”, “perpetuated opacity” and an “extreme disservice to the game of tennis”, besides “obstructing the effective discharge of her court-mandated instructions”.
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