Earlier this week, Preeti Chandra, wife of Sanjay Chandra (in photo), was arrested. (FILE)
Five weeks after Sanjay and Ajay Chandra were moved from Delhi's Tihar Jail to separate prisons in Mumbai, the Supreme Court has suspended officials at Tihar for colluding with the Chandra brothers and allowing them to run their business from within prison in violation of all rules.
Sanjay and his older brother, Ajay, are the former owners of Unitech, which was one of India's real estate majors for several years. The brothers were arrested in 2017 for failing to build houses for which they had collected thousands of crores. They also face charges of money-laundering and other financial crimes.
Earlier this week, Sanjay Chandra's wife, Preeti Chandra, was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate on charges of money-laundering, along with her father-in-law Ramesh Chandra, who is 80, and set up Unitech and ran the company with his sons.
The Enforcement Directorate had last month complained in the Supreme Court that the Chandras had been allowed special privileges while in prison by corrupt jail officials. The court then ordered that the brothers should be relocated to prisons in Mumbai and be lodged separately.
Today's order for action against the jail officials includes an FIR or police case for criminal conspiracy; it is not known yet how many Tihar officers have been punished - details were shared with the court in a sealed cover. The policemen who have been suspended today were named in a report reviewed by Delhi top cop Rakesh Asthana.
In 2017, the government was allowed to take over the management control of Unitech, a rare intervention which the government said would help those who had paid the company for homes that were never delivered to them.
The government sought permission from the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) to appoint new directors to the board of Unitech, citing mismanagement and siphoning of funds.
Unitech owed about 7.24 billion rupees ($112.34 million) to 51,000 depositors who had placed funds with the company to earn higher interest rates than typically available in banks, government lawyers said.