Bengaluru: The state government has decided to hand over the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike’s multi-crore bills scam during earlier BJP tenure in the BBMP to a one-man judicial Commission, headed by a retired High Court judge, said Bengaluru Development Minister K.J. George on Friday.
The decision has been taken in the wake of slow progress of the probe by the Criminal Investigation Department. The Chief Minister had earlier ordered a CID probe into the Rs. 1,539-crore fake bill scam.
Speaking to reporters, George said, “The CID so far has not made any significant progress in the scam and booked the culprits. The CID has been investigating over 250 cases of bogus bill payments, allegedly committed during the previous BJP tenure in the BBMP. Another over 4,500 cases of such bogus bill payments are yet to be uncovered by the CID sleuths”.
The judicial commission will be assisted by three engineers. The government will write to the Karnataka High Court Chief Justice to recommend the name of a retired judge to chair the judicial commission, he added.
In the multi-crore scam, the elected representatives from Gandhinagar, Rajarajeshwari Nagar and Malleswaram divisions of the BBMP had siphoned off over Rs. 1,500 crore. Later, several files pertaining to bills related to the scam were gutted in an accidental fire in 2011.
A one-man committee headed by IAS officer Rajendra Kumar Kataria has probed into various irregularities in the BBMP and found misutilisation of funds. The CID has filed a series of charge sheets in the multi-crore bogus bill scam reported in 2011 in the three subdivisions of the BBMP.
