Mumbai:
A whistle-bowler in the Lavasa case, former IAS officer Ramesh Kumar says he had submitted a report in July 2010 to the Maharashtra government on the many irregularities in the project. Mr Kumar's role in exposing the scam was highlighted by retired police officer and lawyer-activist YP Singh yesterday, when he "exposed" the Pawar family's role in Lavasa project and accused them of "money laundering."
Mr Singh had also hit out at Mr Kejriwal and said he had repressed a "mega-scam" starring Sharad Pawar and set in the controversial hill town of Lavasa, being built near Pune over 25,000 acres at a reported cost of 3,000 crores.
Mr Kumar told NDTV today that in his 2010 report, he had said that the Krishna Valley Development Corporation leased out a considerable portion of government and
gram panchyat land on a lease of Rs 3.28 lakh for a period 30 years. This was a violation as a private entity cannot transfer government land for commercial purposes. He says surplus land of 300 hectares was bought by Lavasa Corporation and they failed to pay 75 per cent of the premium payable to the government. The Lavasa Corporation also bought land from 100 tribal cultivators without following the due procedure.
Mr Singh yesterday presented documents that suggest in 2002, a company named the Lake City Corporation got 348 acres on a 30-year lease for Rs. 23,000 a month. "A tiny one-bedroom flat in Mumbai costs more to rent," the former cop said. The reason that the government was so generous with this deal, he said, is because Mr Pawar's daughter Supriya and her husband Sadanand Sule held 20 per cent stake in the company.
In 2006, Mr Singh says, Ms Sule and her husband sold their stake in the company that would morph into the Lavasa Corporation. He says that in 2009, when Ms Sule was obliged to declare her assets as a Member of Parliament, she said she was worth 15 crores. The activist says she blatantly misreported the facts because Axis Bank had evaluated the Lavasa Corporation at 10,000 crores, so her 10 per cent stake (and another 10 per cent held by her husband) would have been several hundred crores. He described this as "a huge money-laundering exercise."
Ramesh Kumar was then Principal Secretary of the Revenue Department, which keeps records of all government-owned land. However, Mr Singh has claimed, the then Revenue Minister Narayan Rane, also from Mr Pawar's party, shunted an inquiry in to Mr Kumar's report.
Mr Rane today told NDTV that these allegations were baseless. "Ramesh Kumar did submit a report to me and pointed out the irregularities but they were regularised by a high-powered committee," he said, adding that the Maharashtra government had been benefited by 1 lakh crore from the project.
YP Singh says that Lavasa reaped more windfalls for the Pawars. In 2009, he says Sharad and Ajit Pawar ordered senior bureaucrats to meet them at a guesthouse within the Lavasa premises. There, they ruled in favour of a request from the Lavasa Corporation which allowed the firm to add several floors to its building plans. Essentially, the Floor to Area Ratio (FAR) and other rules were relaxed so that Lavasa could build much more than usually permitted. These concessions were recorded in the minutes of the meeting, he alleged. "How did Sharad Pawar hold a meeting with Maharashtra officials in the Lavasa guest house? He was Union Agriculture Minister; what jurisdiction did he have?" he asked.
"Everything was done according to policy," said Mr Pawar, refuting charges that he intervened in the Lavasa project because his daughter and her husband once owned stake in the company building the township. "The chief minister made me responsible for project since it was in my district. What's wrong with that?" asked Mr Pawar, whose Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) co-governs Maharashtra with the Congress.
Lavasa had been taken to court in 2010 by an NGO for violating the terms of its environmental clearances. It was forced to stop construction till it was given conditional permission in November to proceed with its plans.
While Mr Pawar has denied allegations of wrongdoing, Team Kejriwal has so far remained silent on Mr Singh's allegations that the activist-turned-politician, who launched his political party earlier this month, chose to focus on a "lesser scam" and is selective about which politicians he targets. Though Mr Kejriwal's associate Manish Sisodia congratulated YP Singh for speaking about Mr Pawar, he skirted questions about the allegations against Mr Kejriwal.
In the third round of his "exposes" against "corrupt" politicians, Mr Kejriwal had said on Wednesday that BJP president Nitin Gadkari had grabbed 100 acres of farmers' land in collusion with the NCP-Congress government in Maharashtra.