Vadra-DLF deal - MISSING PAGES ~~~

Pages of file pertaining to Vadra-DLF deal missing: Khemka

An internal inquiry has been instituted in the matter and efforts are on to reconstruct the file
Press Trust of India  |  Chandigarh  

December 20, 2014 Last Updated at 00:39 IST

Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer Ashok Khemka has sought registration of a First Information Report (FIR) after a Right To Information (RTI ) query by him found two pages of a file on the DLF-Robert Vadra deal missing from government records. Admitting that the pages were missing, Chief Secretary P K Gupta said an internal inquiry had been instituted in the matter and efforts were on to reconstruct the file.

Khemka, who had over two years back cancelled mutation of the land deal between Robert Vadra’s company M/s Skylight Hospitality and DLF, said official notings pertaining to setting up a three-member committee by the previous Bhupinder Singh Hooda government, which gave a clean chit to Vadra’s firm, were “missing” from the main file. Demanding that a case be registered in the matter, Khemka said, “It is a serious matter and it should be probed... how can the notings suddenly be untraceable?”

“The file noting is a very important piece of record which would establish that the three members were specifically appointed to an illegally constituted committee by the then political executive, where the only remedy to an aggrieved party was to file a writ petition in the high court, with the pre-determined objective to accord a clean chit to black-marketing of colony licence by M/s Skylight Hospitality, a company belonging to Robert Vadra, and to discredit my action of cancelling the land mutation from M/s Skylight Hospitality to M/s DLF,” Khemka charged in a letter on Thursday to the Haryana chief secretary.

The two pages with notings on the previous Congress government’s decision to constitute an official probe committee that later gave a clean chit to Vadra and DLF of any wrongdoing in Gurgaon land deal are untraceable, the present state government said responding to Khemka’s RTI plea.

State Public Information Officer D R Wadhwa, in an affidavit before State Information Commission a week back, mentioned that despite efforts to trace page no 1 and 2 of the noting of the file, these could not be traced and, therefore, these pages could not be provided to Khemka.

The 48-year-old IAS officer, whose action to cancel the mutation in October 2012 had raised a political storm, had sought the documents to ascertain how the official committee, which later on gave a clean chit to Vadra, was constituted.

The chief secretary on his part said it was a fact that a page of the file was missing.

“We are trying to reconstruct the file because I think it was six-seven months back when somebody asked for information under RTI, somebody other than Khemka. He had asked for information and that information was given to him... We are approaching the Information Commissioner's office to see if a copy of that is available with that office," he said.

Khemka wrote to the chief secretary that under RTI the former has been informed that noting related to constitution of the committee constituted on October 19, 2012, barely a week after the mutation was cancelled “by the then political executive to give clean chit to Skylight Hospitality and to discredit my action of cancelling the mutation is detached from main file and is denied to me under RTI Act”.

“This is serious, now there can be no scrutiny of the matter as to how Krishna Mohan, K K Jalan and Rajan Gupta became members, what were the terms of reference and what occasioned the constitution of the committee when the parties were not aggrieved against my orders and the only remedy against the order was to approach the high court,” he wrote.

The previous Hooda government had constituted the committee after Khemka cancelled the mutation and IAS officers Krishna Mohan, K K Jalan and Rajan Gupta were part of the committee.

Of the three officers in the probe committee, Krishna Mohan has retired.
http://www.business-standard.com/article/pti-stories/pages-of-file-pertaining-to-vadra-dlf-deal-missing-khemka-114121900386_1.html