The Bombay High Court today transferred from the state CID to the CBI, probe into the Pune land scam under the Urban Land Ceiling and Regulation Act (ULCA) and directed the agency to register FIRs against former Urban Development minister and Mumbai BJP chief Raj Purohit and other revenue officers of the department within six weeks.
"According to the report, submitted by the one-man committee appointed by the government, the minister (Purohit) and several revenue officers of the Urban Development department had abused their powers and passed brazenly fraudulent orders," a division bench of Justices B H Marlapalle and U D Salvi observed.
"The CBI shall take over the probe and shall take steps to register FIR against all those revenue officers named in the report as well as Purohit, then Minister of State for Urban Development within six weeks," the bench directed.
The court was hearing a PIL filed by BJP spokesperson Madhav Bhandari alleging that between 1976 and 2005, 11,894 returns (statements of property extracts and details of persons having interest in the land) were filed in the ULCA in the Pune urban agglomeration.
According to the PIL, bogus orders were passed under ULCA to avoid surrendering excess land to the state government.
Purohit's lawyer Niteen Pradhan said they would challenge the order.
The 29 cases registered by the State CID, Pune between December 2010 and January 2011 following court orders do not name even one of the revenue officers as accused in the scam. This is one of the reasons why the court feels that the case should be handed over to an independent agency which is not under the control of the state government, Justice Marlapalle said.