Haryana land deal: Robert Vadra appears before ED on 3rd day
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New Delhi (PTI): Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, appeared before the ED on the third straight day on Thursday for questioning in a money laundering case linked to alleged irregularities in a 2008 Haryana land deal case.
The 56-year-old has been questioned for over ten hours in the last two days as part of the investigation and the recording of his statement process under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) will continue Thursday, officials said.
He reached the ED office in central Delhi shortly after 11 am accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is MP from Wayanad.
Vadra had called the ED action borne out of "political vendetta" against him and his family, and said that while he has always cooperated with the agency and furnished thousands of pages of documents, he needed a "closure" in these cases which are almost 20 years old.
The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana's Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram.
The deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre of land in Shikohpur from Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power at that time. Four years later, in September 2012, the company sold the land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got embroiled in controversy in October 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum-Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.
The BJP, which was in opposition then, had termed the case an instance of "corruption" in land deals and that of "nepotism", hinting at Vadra's kinship with the first family of the Congress party.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.
Sources told PTI that the ED will soon file chargesheets in all these three cases being investigated against Vadra.
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Is VSR Ventures owner trying to blame pilot for Ajit Pawar's plane crash? Rohit Pawar
Pune (PTI): NCP (SP) MLA Rohit Pawar has questioned if VSR Ventures owner V K Singh was trying to hold the pilot of the Learjet aircraft responsible for the crash that killed Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar and four others in January.
The Crime Investigation Department questioned Singh and recorded his statement last week, a CID officer had said, without disclosing details.
The CID has not issued any statement about the details regarding Singh's questioning.
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A Learjet 45 aircraft, operated by VSR Ventures, crashed near the Baramati air strip in Pune district on January 28, killing Ajit Pawar and four others.
Citing reports in a section of media about a submission purportedly made by Singh to CID, Rohit Pawar in a post on X on Monday said, "What exactly was recorded in the black box has still not been revealed. If that is the case, how did VSR company owner V K Singh come to know within a short time of the crash that it was the pilot's fault?"
"If this gentleman is declaring that the pilot was at fault and washing his hands of the matter, it appears as though he is trying to shift the blame onto someone else while keeping himself out of it," he added.
Until authorities release concrete and credible information about the plane crash, people should not believe any discussions or baseless claims, the NCP (SP) MLA said.
"The CID has said that the investigation into Ajit Dada's plane crash is still underway. It is even difficult to talk about the credibility of the recent preliminary report by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB)," he stated.
At times, reports say the black box of the plane was burnt, while at other times it is claimed that the data has been recovered, the legislator pointed out.
"Meanwhile, the investigating agencies are maintaining complete silence on the matter," he added.
