CHANDIGARH, June 14: UT Judicial Magistrate Sanjiv Kumar has issued arrest warrants against three officials of the Municipal Corporation Chandigarh (MCC) and a former official of the UT Engineering Department for their involvement in the kickbacks case.The MCC officials are K.B. Sharma, Superintending Engineer; Harsh Kumar, Executive Engineer and Gurpreet Singh, SDO. The fourth official is J.C. Gilhotra, who was earlier the Superintending Engineer of the Engineering Department. He was later repatriated to Punjab as a chief engineer (CE) in the Punjab State Electricity Board. He retired as a CE earlier this year.The arrest warrants were issued yesterday following the application filed by the UT Vigilance Cell. The Cell has been directed to produce these officials in the court on June 25.The Cell is investigating allegations of large-scale corruption by various officials. It had also registered First Information Reports (FIR) against various officials under the Prevention of Corruption Act.The investigators point out that all these four officials are not available to join the enquiry. They highlight that raids have been carried out at their residences for the past several days now by the vigilance officials but they have not been able to trace these persons.It is learnt that the names of these officials figure in the account books of the middlemen. The officials allegedly received huge kickbacks from these middlemen for various supply orders of the MCC and the Engineering Department. The middlemen had earlier been arrested by the Vigilance Cell and are now in judicial custody.It is also alleged that K.B. Sharma, Harsh Kumar and Gurpreet Singh received kickbacks during their tenure in the Municipal Corporation. Gilhotra allegedly received the kickbacks while he was the SE in the Engineering Department here.Efforts were made by Newsline to contact these four officials, but only the families of K.B. Sharma and Gurpreet Singh could be contacted. Sharma's wife, Vijay Sharma, told Newsline that her husband was on leave for some days now and was expected to return within two to three days. She did not know of any arrest warrant being issued against her husband.Gurpreet's father, Amarjeet Singh, said that his son was not at home. ``He left home four to five days ago. We ourselves are looking for him as his whereabouts are not known,'' said Amarjeet Singh. He admitted that some vigilance teams had come to his residence to look for Gurpreet, but said he did not know of any case being registered against him.
