Court discharges IRB officials in land scam

PUNE: A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court in Pune on Wednesday discharged two companies and two individuals, including the chief of a road construction company, named in an alleged land grabbing case.

Special judge AK Patil discharged Ideal Road Builders’s chairman and managing director Virendra D Mhaiskar and Deepak Gadgil, identified as the authorised signatory of Aryan Infrastructure Investments (a subsidiary of Ideal Road Builders), and the two companies in the suspected land grab.

The judge observed that no case had been made out against the suspects. CBI counsel Vijaykumar Dhakane said a detailed order will be available in the next two days.

According to a statement by Ideal Road Builders, the judge, after considering the entire chargesheet, the documents on record and the submissions made by parties to the case, passed an order in which he observed that no case had been made out even to frame the charges under any of the sections alleged by the CBI.

The agency had filed a chargesheet accusing IRB officials, farmers and agents of buying land, originally acquired by the government, for the PuneMumbai expressway near Lonavla, and reselling it to one of its sister concerns.

A case of cheating, criminal conspiracy and forgery was filed, based on the information obtained under the Right to Information Act by RTI activist Satish Shetty, who was stabbed to death in January 2010, by an unidentified person.