High court orders to file Chargesheet against Digvijay
BHOPAL: In case of illegal construction of Indore Mall, the Madhya Pradesh High Court has directed the Economics Offences Wing (EOW) to file a chargesheet against former state chief minister Digvijay Singh and 11 others for flouting rules and allowing illegal construction of an Indore mall.
On Wednesday Justice Prakash Shrivastava and Justice Sanjay Seth of the court’s Indore bench asked the EOW to present the chargesheet before the court by June 30 and submit the detailed compliance report by July 4.
The Treasure Island Mall, centrally located on Indore’s Mahatma Gandhi Road, came up in the area marked for residential purposes only under the city’s 1991 master plan. A special permission was given to allow the mall’s construction on a 25,000 sq feet plot.
Petitioner Mahesh Garg had taken the complaint to the EOW three years back alleging that Digvijay’s government changed rules and committed irregularities to approve the mall’s construction. The EOW registered an FIR based on Garg’s complaint and documents seized on February 12, 2009.
Garg’s lawyer, Manohar Dalal said, “The EOW did little in the investigations. The case file was shuffled around from one department to another and the investigating officer was changed five times in two years.”
He said it was evident that there was political pressure not to pursue the investigations. “We decided to file a petition before the court on March 18, 2010. The court asked the EOW for the investigation report. But other than correspondence with some departments nothing had been done.”
He said the special permission for the mall’s construction was given on 25,000 sq feet land. “But the government changed it to 1,00,000 sq feet in the gazette notification.”
