Three booked for duping, trying to extort contractor

Three men, including a journalist, have been booked for allegedly duping a Metro project contractor of INR 28 lakh and trying to extort INR 50 lakh more from him. The accused have been identified as Pramod Singh, Deepak Babar and Sunil Soradkar.

MUMBAI: Three men, including a journalist, were booked on Thursday for allegedly duping a Metro project contractor of ₹28 lakh and trying to extort ₹50 lakh more from him.

HT Image

The complainant, Banshbahadur Jaiswal, 56, owner of Jaiswal Construction Company, had approached a court following which an FIR was registered against the trio.

The accused have been identified as Pramod Singh, Deepak Babar and Sunil Soradkar.

Jaiswal, who is in-charge of piling work for the Metro project, said that he had known Babar since 2011 and later got introduced to Singh through him. Babar told Jaiswal that Singh was the Maharashtra head for Social Helpline, an NGO. The two then introduced the contractor to Soradkar, a reporter working for a digital platform.

Jaiswal claimed that he had made donations worth lakhs to the NGO. From 2019 to 2022, Jaiswal said he had given ₹19.23 lakh to Singh and Babar for various social awareness campaigns. “During the Covid-19 lockdown, I had paid Singh and Babar ₹3 lakh for food grain distribution to the poor,” Jaiswal said in his statement to the police.

According to Jaiswal, the three assumed that Jaiswal had received the entire amount and demanded ₹50 lakh from Jaiswal. When Jaiswal said that he had got just ₹32 lakh and was ready to give them ₹9 lakh, the trio began defaming him with the help of Soradkar’s posts and articles, the contractor added.

“Following this, Jaiswal approached the court. On May 4, the court ordered the police to register an FIR for cheating, extortion, conspiracy and under relevant sections of the Information Technology Act,” a Charkop police official said.