Chandigarh: The Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted multiple raids across Punjab Wednesday in the infamous ‘guava scam’ being investigated by the state Vigilance Bureau.
Apart from private persons accused in the scam, the ED conducted raids at the residence of Punjab excise commissioner Varun Roojam and Firozepur deputy commissioner Rajesh Dhiman, both IAS officers. Later, Dhiman was detained.
Dhiman’s wife Jasmeen Kaur is an accused in the case while Roojam’s wife Simarpreet Kaur is also under scanner. The residence of the alleged kingpin Bhupinder Singh, a property dealer, was also searched by ED teams.
The scam involved the accused feigning as horticulturists and taking compensation worth crores from the Punjab government for guava cultivated on land under acquisition.
In May last year, the Vigilance Bureau registered an FIR in the Rs 137 crore scam that named a total of 18 accused. The vigilance officers have since arrested almost three dozen persons including a retired Punjab Civil Services (PCS) officer and other senior officers of the horticulture, revenue and housing departments.
In its FIR, the Vigilance Bureau states that the Greater Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) officials, including Dhiman who was posted as additional chief administrator in 2018, used inside information and facilitated close relatives and partners to buy land identified for acquisition and plant guava trees for coughing up a large compensation for the orchards as well as the land.
Despite Dhiman’s mention in the FIR, he was not arrayed as accused by the bureau in its FIR. The Vigilance Bureau remained silent on the role, if any, played by Roojam in the scam who had remained the GMADA chief administrator in 2017.
The bureau filed a challan in July last year. Most of the accused, including Jasmeen Kaur, have been granted bail by the high court on the condition that they would return the total money scammed from the government. The VB has since recovered over Rs 43 crore from the accused, so far.
According to the Vigilance Bureau, Bhupinder Singh and his family members had got Rs 24 crore as compensation from GMADA. Another accused Mukesh Jindal and his family members got more than Rs 20 crore. Jasmeen Kaur got Rs 1.17 crore as compensation, it said.
The Vigilance Bureau has challenged the high court’s decision to grant bail to the accused in the Supreme Court where the matter is now pending.
The scam came to light last year when the bureau found that GMADA had granted Rs 137 crore as compensation to a set of “horticulturists” who planted guava trees on 100 acres of land under acquisition.
The GMADA had acquired the land — a portion of which is at Bakarpur village in Mohali district — to develop Aerotroplis, a housing project.
The FIR points out that despite a notification of land acquisition, the accused purchased the land illegally in order to qualify for compensation.
Apart from illegally buying land which was locked under the acquisition process, it said, the accused also defrauded the government by showing that dense orchards were present on their plots. This, it said, resulted in the accused receiving compensation for the income that they would have earned in the next 20 years from these orchards.
Firstly, guava trees were shown in large numbers, in some cases thousands in barely an acre of land. Secondly, the guavas were shown to be of a very high quality through forged reports from the horticulture department for extracting the maximum possible compensation. Revenue records were forged to show that the trees were planted in 2016 while these were planted in 2018 to show the orchards came up much before land acquisition. Some of the beneficiaries did not even fully own the land on which their orchards were planted, the FIR said.
Apart from almost two dozen private persons accused in the case, officials of the horticulture department, one of whom retired as a deputy director, retired patwaris of Bakarpur village and land acquisition collectors were also booked.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
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