ACB records quality8217; corruption cases

AUGUST 18: Barely a day after the Prime Minister made an impassioned Independence Day appeal to end corruption the Anti Corruption Bureau h...

AUGUST 18: Barely a day after the Prime Minister made an impassioned Independence Day appeal to end corruption the Anti Corruption Bureau had netted its third ground breaking quality8217; case in the city.

Inspector Layakmia Bademiya Sheikh of the MRA Marg police station was caught red handed while accepting a bribe of Rs 50,000 from a shipping agent in the city on Saturday. For the first time in the police history an officer was nabbed soon after his name was announced for the prestigious police medal on Independence Day.

8220;More than the money involved, the number of quality cases have gone up,8221; a senior ACB official told Express Newsline adding that a quality case was one which made citizens come forward with fresh cases of corruption.

In the last three months, the ACB has broken new ground on corruption cases with the arrests of a Deputy Municipal Commissioner of the BMC and a desk officer in Mantralaya and a court verdict on Monday rejecting the bail of two school officials in a capitation fee case.

The first two cases which received wide publicity have contributed in some measure to this. 8220;People are now coming forward in a big way, we receive scores of visitors every day,8221; said Director General ACB Arvind Inamdar who spoke to Newsline from Pune. Three persons from Mumbai, Pune and Akola approached him with complaints against government servants in a single day, he added.

The ACB followed a lengthy procedure before setting a trap including verification of the complaint and waiting for the opportune moment to set the trap. 8220;Even now we have been waiting for a long time to spring some traps,8221; Inamdar said.

Though the ACB has admitted that the trials in such cases take up to a decade to reach their conclusion, the conviction rate is over 50 per cent. A few months ago, the ACB widened its net to include capitation fees under the Prevention of Corruption Act. The City Civil and Sessions court on Monday rejected anticipatory bail applications of two school officials from the St Lawrence and the St Xavier school who demanded capitation fees from relatives of two school children.

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In Sheikh8217;s case bystanders on PM road, Fort were treated to the spectacle of a police inspector in uniforms being led away by plainclothes ACB officers, some of them his former colleagues.

But the ACB netted its biggest fish when it trapped Deputy Commissioner Indravadan Chimanlal Gandhi of the BMC for accepting a bribe of Rs 1 lakh at his residence on June 25. Gandhi was the senior-most civic official nabbed by the ACB. In another first last month, the ACB trapped a desk officer attached to the Agriculture Department of Mantralaya for demanding a bribe of Rs 1000 for pushing a file of a suspended district fisheries development officer. New territory for the ACB, the closest the bureau ever got to Mantralaya was when they nabbed an assistant while accepting bribe.