New Delhi:
Accompanied by his wife and Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Robert Vadra reached the Enforcement Directorate (ED) office for the second consecutive day in the Gurugram land case. He entered the office but only after exchanging a hug with Ms Gandhi.
Mr Vadra, a businessman and brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, is appearing before the ED for his questioning in a 2008 Haryana land deal linked money laundering case.
He was questioned for about five hours on Tuesday and his statement was recorded by the federal probe agency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), official sources said.
The probe against Mr Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana’s Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram. The land deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Mr Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre land in Shikohpur from a firm named Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power that time. Four years later, in September, 2012, the company sold this 3.53 acre land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got into 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.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Mr Vadra had termed the ED action “political vendetta”. He said he has always cooperated with investigative agencies and has furnished huge amount of documents, stressing that there needs to be a closure in cases which are as old as 20 years.
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