THE Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) in Nagpur filed a charge-sheet against 12 accused, including 5 former government employees, for the various irregularities detected during a probe in the tender process of Mokhabardi Lift Irrigation Scheme of the Gosikhurd irrigation project on Tuesday. A FIR was lodged in the case on June 23, 2016 against these persons in the case at Nagpur’s sadar police station. A press note issued by ACB has said, “after investigation into the case, various irregularities were confirmed on the basis of which a 4,457 – page charge-sheet was filed in the Special ACB court here on Tuesday.” The twelve persons named in the charge-sheet are then Chief Engineer Sopan Suryawanshi, then Executive Engineer Umashankar Parvate, then Senior Divisional Accountant Chandan Jibhkate, then Executive Director of Vidarbha Irrigation Development Corporation (VIDC) Devendra Shirke, then Superintending Engineer Dilip Pohekar, partners of the accused joint venture (JV) companies R J Shah and Co. Ltd and D. Thakkar Construction Pvt. Ltd. namely Kalindi Shah, Tejaswini Shah, Vishal Thakkar, Pravin Thakkar, Jigar Thakkar, Arun Kumar Gupta (company’s Technical Director) and Ramesh Kumar Soni (Power of Attorney holder). The ACB press note says that the then VIDC officials and the JV company officials had entered into a criminal conspiracy to decide the award of the Rs-56,57,32,580 contract in favor of the JV company by faking the whole process. The charge-sheet details how the VIDC officials committed irregularity by not properly scrutinizing the “fake” eligibility documents submitted by the company. “the officials facilitated the accrual of illegal financial benefit to the accused company,” it further says. The charge-sheet mentions, “the JV company had concealed that it was executing that the Dagadparwa project of the VIDC at Akola to win the Mokhabardi contract. It had also paid ernest money deposit of a rival company in the tender process to create artificial competition to corner the bid.”
