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Mohali: Missing ₹5-crore bank guarantee: Vigilance books two PUDA staffers
Forgery case registered against clerk, former administrative officer, who is now retired, for destroying bank guarantee submitted by a firm in 2009 for a hotel site
Nearly six years after a ₹5-crore bank guarantee submitted by a hotel firm went missing at Punjab Urban Development Authority (PUDA), the Punjab Vigilance Bureau has booked two employees of the authority for forgery.
Among the two accused, Harpreet Singh, a clerk, has been arrested, while Raj Kumar Garg,an administrative officer, who has since retired, is at large.
It was in 2009 when Blue Coast Hotels and Resorts Limited had applied for a hotel site in Amritsar through Punjab Infrastructure Development Board (PIDB) that further asked PUDA to allot the land.
For this, the company submitted a bank guarantee of ₹5 crore to PIDB that forwarded it to PUDA.
Before its expiry on March 31, 2013, the firm wrote to the PUDA chief administrator (CA) in February to extend the bank guarantee till 2016 as they had not got site clearance. But the officials concerned failed to do so, despite the directions of the CA, and the guarantee’s period expired.
Following this, the then CA, Manvesh Singh Sidhu, directed the officials to fix the responsibility of the negligent staff. After an internal probe, the bank guarantee was found missing, following which an FIR of theft was registered against Raj Kumar Garg.
In 2018, the case was handed over to the Vigilance Bureau. After a three-year-long probe, the bureau established that the bank guarantee was not stolen, but deliberately misplaced under a conspiracy by Garg and Singh.
As such, the theft FIR lodged under Section 379 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) was changed to Sections 465 (forgery), 467 (forgery of valuable security, will, etc), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating), 409 (criminal breach of trust by public servant), 471 (using as genuine a forged document or electronic record) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the IPC, and Section 13 of Prevention of Corruption Act.
“We have arrested Harpreet Singh, who has been sent to two-day police remand, and will also nab Garg soon. We are looking into who was benefitted by their act of destroying the evidence and the role of the hotel firm,” said deputy superintendent of police (DSP) Ajay Kumar.
Garg retired in September 2013 and is currently living in Sector 67, Mohali.
