Special court junks advance bail plea of 6 GBA engineers in Rs 250-cr scam
BENGALURU: A Special Court in the city rejected the anticipatory bail petitions filed by the six engineers, including the two retired chief engineers of Greater Bengaluru Authority (GBA), in connection with the alleged misappropriation of Rs 250 crore by creating bogus bills for the works not done in the city. Nowadays, this type of crime and scams by bureaucrats, politicians and contractors with high-handedness has become more common without the fear of law and moral responsibilities. The common people, having become the silent spectators, are witnessing this type of scams with no voice to resist because of high-handedness and lawlessness, said Judge K M Radhakrishna, Special Court for Lokayukta Cases. The accused are Doddaiah AB, retired Chief Engineer; Sateesh, Assistant Executive Engineer; Vijay Kumar N, retired Chief Engineer; Shilpa M, Assistant Engineer; Basavaraju, Assistant Executive Engineer, and one M Siddaramaiah. The court said that the investigating agency has recently conducted a search of the houses and offices of the petitioners. The seizure of several documents from petitioners and others is reported to the court. The court said that the documents and the case diary suggest that not only the people who filed the petition, but also other unknown individuals, were involved in the crime and acted in a very forceful or abusive way. According to the Lokayukta case, the petitioners allegedly issued work orders to the contractors to carry out the work in November and December 2019 by creating bogus bills in collusion with them and others, without carrying out the intended works. In January 2020, they released an amount to the contractors through Karnataka Rural Infrastructure Development Limited (KRIDL) based on bogus bills and misappropriated more than Rs 250 crore. A case was registered this year, and a probe is being done. Stating that the peculiar facts of the case pressed the necessity of custodial interrogation to ensure the safety of the material witnesses, evidence and the effective investigation, the court said that there appears to be every possibility of derailing the course of the investigation if anticipatory bail is granted. This court held that this is not a fit case to grant the pre-arrest bail, as no grounds are made out at this stage, the court added. The public prosecutor submitted that all the petitioners are high-handed people with the support of influential and invisible elements. The petitioners claimed that a false case was registered against them more than five years after the date of work alleged to have been carried out, that too at the instance of the then Member of Parliament, to meet the political expediency. Moreover, the complaint does not indicate the specific role played by each one of them and the manner in which they were involved in the crime, they alleged.
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