CHANDIGARH: Enforcement Directorate (ED) is closely examining the role of several senior bureaucrats in Punjab, including the Director, Town and Country Planning, Chief Town Planner and other functionaries linked to the approval process of Change of Land Use (CLU) permissions for real estate projects.
The agency is also examining the role of officials in the Housing and Urban Development Department.
The scrutiny includes the Suntech City project in New Chandigarh.
The apex investigating agency arrested Ajay Sehgal, a jeweller-turned-real estate developer and promoter of the Indian Cooperative House Building Society, last night in connection with the multi-crore case involving alleged forgery of landowners’ consent letters to obtain CLU approvals for the mega housing project.
It is expected that in the coming days, senior officials of the Great Mohali Area Development Authority (GMADA) and the Town and Country Planning Department might be arrested.
Sources said the investigations by the ED have also brought under scrutiny the alleged role of influential political figures across regimes, including a senior functionary linked to the present ruling regime.
The agency is also probing more than a dozen real estate projects where authorities had allegedly revoked only partial CLUs under Section 85 of the PRTPD Act instead of initiating stricter punitive proceedings under Section 90.
It is allegedly suspected that the move was deliberately taken to allow builders to liquidate remaining inventory and protect commercial interests.
The agency is also examining why no FIRs were registered under the Punjab Apartment and Property Regulation Act (PAPRA), 1995, despite alleged large-scale violations in several projects.
There is a buzz in the bureaucratic circles over reports that certain senior Punjab Police officials allegedly pushed for the quashing of the First Information Report (FIR) as the investigators suspect that the interests of influential politicians and bureaucrats were intertwined with the case.
Sehgal had moved a petition seeking the quashing of a case registered against him in 2022 at Mullanpur police station under IPC Sections 420, 467, 468, 471, 472 and 120-B related to cheating, forgery and criminal conspiracy in the Suntech matter.
It is pointed out that had the FIR been quashed, the money laundering investigation of the ED could have suffered a major setback since the predicate offence forms the basis of the PMLA proceedings.
Sehgal is considered well connected to politicians and bureaucrats and has been active in the Chandigarh-Mohali-New Chandigarh real estate area and is associated with projects such as Suntech City, La Canela and District 7.
The ED has initiated an investigation against Sehgal based on an FIR registered by the Punjab Police on the basis of a complaint received from farmers whose consent was forged to obtain the CLU.
The investigation has revealed that Sehgal had prepared fake consent letters with respect to 30.5 acres of land of 15 landowners.
The CLU for developing a real estate mega project, namely ‘Suntec City’, was granted based on these fake consent letters, which were prepared with forged signatures and thumbprints of the landowners.
Earlier, on May 7, ED carried out searches on eight premises linked to Indian Cooperative House Building Society and ABS Township Private Limited.