City Centre case: Saini’s petition against closure report dismissed
LUDHIANA : The court of district and sessions judge Gurbir Singh has dismissed former Punjab DGP Sumedh Singh Saini’s plea challenging the closure report in the Ludhiana City Centre case dating back to March 2007. The court will now resume hearing arguments on the closure report from March 28, the next date of hearing.
“The vigilance bureau is the complainant in the case. Sumedh Saini, at that time, was the supervising officer. He was thus neither the complainant nor the informant,” said the court dismissing the plea. Saini had moved the petition on November 28 last year, urging the court to ‘hear him out’ before passing an order on the cancellation report.
Saini, who was the director, vigilance bureau, at the time the case was registered in 2007, stated in the application that a contradictory view had been taken by vigilance in 2017 when it submitted a cancellation report, a decade after the FIR was registered.
Touted as one of the biggest projects in the state, the city cention, tre plan was rolled out in 2006. The complex was supposed to have shopping malls, multiplexes, apartments and a helipad. The Punjab vigilance bureau registered a case in March 2007, wherein Capt Amarinder Singh, his son Raninder Singh, and former local bodies minister Jagjit Singh, now dead, were named, along with others, for allegedly causing monetary loss to the state. They had awarded the contract for a multimillion mega project for the City Centre in Ludhiana to a New Delhi-based construction company.
PROSECUTION’S VERSION
The Punjab prosecution department led by director, prosecu- VK Singla, had strongly objected to the application filed by Saini and had questioned as to why the officer ‘kept mum’ all these years.
During the course of arguments, the prosecution had pleaded that Saini had never acted in a private capacity while discharging the functions of vigilance director. “Saini had acted while discharging his official duties at that time. None of them can be said to have any personal interest or suffered any injury, incurring any right to be heard,” the prosecution had stated.
“The closure report was filed on August 9, 2017. All proceedings pertaining to the case have been regularly reported by the media. It is, therefore, strange that the applicant has filed the present application after such a long period despite the fact that he was in service till June 30, 2018,” the prosecution added.
Last year, the court had dismissed similar pleas, challenging the closure report, that had been filed separately by Lok Insaaf Party MLA Simarjeet Bains, former vigilance SSP Kanwarjit Singh Sandhu and Sunil Kumar Day, an architect of the project.