New Delhi, Jun 18 (DHNS): Essar Group is once again in the news for wrong reasons after a complaint reached the Prime Minister’s Office, accusing it of illegally tapping phones of VVIPs over the years.

The 29-page complaint was filed by Noida-based lawyer Suren Uppal on June 1 after a former Essar employee Albasit Khan, who was handling the security operations of the company, handed him over a tranche of recordings earlier this year. Khan was forced to leave Essar in 2011 and he retained a copy of the conversations.

The phones were illegally tapped from 2001 and the victims included former Prime Minister A B Vajpayee's NSA Brajesh Mishra, his foster son-in-law Ranjan Bhattacharya, former Union ministers Jaswant Singh, Pramod Mahajan, Piyush Goyal, Suresh Prabhu and as well industrialists Mukesh Ambani and his brother Anil Ambani.

Other names include current Home secretary Rajiv Mehrishi, Bollywood star Amitabh Bachchan and Sahara’s Subroto Roy.

The veracity of the recordings or the contents of the complaint could not be independently verified. The recordings, according to details available in public domain, indicate to the illegal phone tapping to understand what corporate rivals were doing and on how to influence decision making at the higher echelons of power.

In response to a caution notice sent to the corporate by Uppal in March, Essar had denied "each and every allegation, statement and assertions" made against it. It has also now said that there is no justification to say that these were their tapes.

Essar is already facing trouble in the Supreme Court over a complaint over politicians-corporate nexus to get their work done. Some journalists were also found to have taken favours from Essar.

According to Uppal's complaint, there were several recordings of telephone conversations involving top leadership of Reliance Industries regarding drumming up support for the continuation of Mahajan as telecom minister, managing cases in courts and KG Basin among others. Reliance had denied any wrongdoing and described the contents as false and highly defamatory.

Some tapped conversations also purportedly referred to managing an order to be issued by the Supreme Court through politicians and paying money to judicial officers. One of the conversations also referred to an MP claiming that he has managed the Joint Parliamentary Committee probing a share scam on behalf of a corporate.