The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) conducted searches at 40 locations in Uttar Pradesh and one each in Rajasthan and West Bengal in connection with the Rs 1,513-crore Gomti Riverfront Park “scam”—a flagship project of the previous Samajwadi Party government.
The searches started on Sunday night and were underway at some locations till late on Monday. The crackdown came after the CBI filed a fresh FIR in the case on July 2 naming 16 public servants and 173 firms and private entities as accused.
The development months ahead of the 2022 UP Assembly elections, where the Samajwadi Party, under Akhilesh Yadav, the Mayawati-led Bahujan Samaj Party, and the Congress, among others, will try to wrest the state from the Bharatiya Janata Party.
Sources in the CBI said the FIR was lodged following revelations that surfaced while probing the original FIR in the scam lodged in 2017 in which only eight engineers were named as accused.
The searches were carried out in Lucknow, Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Meerut, Bulandshahr, Aligarh, Gorakhpur, Agra, Etah and Moradabad. The CBI teams also searched a property each in Alwar district of Rajasthan and Kolkata.
The premises searched included properties of two chief engineers, four superintending engineers, an executive engineer, assistant engineers who were posted with the irrigation department between 2015 and 2017 and had been associated with execution of the project. Premises of private entities associated with the scam were also searched.
The July 2 FIR, on the basis of which searches were conducted, relates to the work related to the Gomti Riverfront Park that was executed between 2015 to March 2017 amounting to Rs 407 crore. It included repairing and painting of bridge, removal of sludge, construction of amphitheatre, installation of swings for children, landscaping and horticulture work from Nishatganj Bridge to Baikunth Dham, audio system, food plaza on Gomti Setu, Rubber Track and Jogging Track.
“Probe revealed that Notice Inviting Tenders for these jobs were not published in national newspapers as required and fake letters were allegedly sent to the information department instead,” the CBI stated in the FIR. The FIR cited investigations to state that tenders were awarded to the firms only on papers, while the proprietors of these firms have denied signing or submitting any document related to the project. It has also been revealed that committees constituted to allocate work related to the project floated fake tenders and awarded contracts to shell firms registered in the names of their relatives or family members.
The FIR also mentions a French firm, Aquatic Show, which was given a contract fraudulently. “Without due permission of the government, the accused engineers misused their official position and gave contract to the French firm on quotation basis, though the accused engineers, in the official records, had shown that tenders were floated which could not be corroborated,” the FIR stated.