Court reserves order on plea seeking FIR against Arvind Kejriwal

NEW DELHI; A Delhi court today reserved for next week its order on a criminal complaint seeking lodging of FIR against Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, his brother -in-law and a public servant for alleged irregularities in grant of contracts for roads and sewer lines here.

Metropolitan Magistrate Abhilash Malhotra listed the plea for February 2 after hearing submissions of the counsel for the complainant who alleged "deep-rooted corruption" and said the documents showed no material was actually purchased for completing the work.

The court was hearing the complaint filed by Rahul Sharma, founder of Roads Anti-Corruption Organisation (RACO), in which officers of Delhi government's Public Works Development (PWD), Kejriwal and his brother-in-law Surender Kumar Bansal, proprietor of a construction firm, were accused of corruption and an FIR was sought to be lodged against them for alleged offences including cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy under the IPC.

Advocate Kislay Pandey, who filed the plea on behalf of the complainant, claimed that the documents showed no materials were actually purchased and documents in this connection were "concocted and forged" by them, causing a loss of over Rs 10 crore to the public exchequer.

He alleged that the role of the Chief Minister must be investigated as he had allegedly caused substantive gains to Bansal and others by using his influence.

The plea also sought prosecution of P K Kathuria, the then executive engineer in PWD, claiming he had connived with other government officials and abused his position to obtain huge money for himself, Bansal and others.

It alleged that Bansal operated through several dummy firms to obtain government contracts in connivance with several senior officials of PWD, which never got executed "whereas shockingly all the payments have been cleared under the pressure of Kejriwal."

Besides lodging of FIR, the complaint also sought the court's direction to call for a status report from the police, monitoring the probe and summon a status report from CBI on a complaint given to them on January 9.