The Narendra Modi government suffered an embarrassment on Friday with the Supreme Court dismissing a CBI appeal against the discharge of the Hinduja brothers in the Bofors case by Delhi High Court in 2005.

“Mr Attorney, we are not convinced with the inordinate delay in your filing the appeal,” Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi told attorney-general K.K. Venugopal, appearing for the CBI.

Venugopal himself had advised the CBI against filing the appeal, saying the court was not likely to entertain it given the nearly 13-year delay. In the normal course, an appeal against a high court order should be filed in 90 days. But the investigation agency overruled his advice and filed the appeal in February this year.

The bench, which included Justices K.M. Joseph and Hemant Gupta, however, said the CBI was free to raise its contentions in a related appeal filed in 2005 by advocate Ashok Agrawal. The CBI was made a respondent by Agrawal, who had accused the agency of deliberately refraining from challenging the discharge of the UK-based Hindujas.

The high court had quashed the charges against the Swedish firm and the Hindujas, the only surviving accused in the Rs 64-crore payoffs case that cost the Rajiv Gandhi government a second term in office.

The dismissal of the CBI’s appeal comes at a time when the Modi government has benched the agency’s director, amid allegations that this was done to prevent an investigation into charges of corruption in the Rafale aircraft deal that runs into thousands of crores.

The CBI argued on Friday that it had been prevented from filing any appeal in the Bofors case by the then UPA governments. It said: “The present case is a fit case for applying the settled principle of criminal jurisprudence that a crime never dies….”

The UPA was in power till May 2014, but the appeal was not filed until February 2018, by when the Modi government was facing the Rafale heat.

Agrawal’s PIL is pending before the apex court, which at the last hearing had asked him to justify its maintainability because a criminal trial is normally held between the state and the accused. Agrawal fought the 2014 election against Sonia Gandhi from Rae Bareli on a BJP ticket.