The Bombay High Court Tuesday slammed the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and other central agencies for lapses in the ongoing probe into the Adarsh Society scam and threatened to set up a special investigating team if they did not expedite matters.
At the hearing, the court also summoned the enforcement director to appear before it in the next hearing, March 12, saying the Enforcement Directorate has not moved an inch into the probe of money-laundering offences by some members of the Adarsh Society.
A division bench of Justice P.B. Majmudar and Justice R.D. Dhanuka pulled up the CBI for slackness though the probe has been going on since January 2011.
It directed the agency to file a status report on its investigations at the next date of hearing, lawyer Ashish Mehta, appearing for one of the petitioners, told.
The judges told the agency that if the bench was satisfied with the status report, the agency would get more time to investigate, and if it seemed it was inactive, then a special team would have to be formed, he said.
The court’s directions came during the hearing of a bunch of petitions filed by social activists Simpreet Singh and Pravin Wategaonkar who sought orders to the ED to probe money-laundering offences and also its intervention to supervise the investigations into the scam.
“The honourable court has termed the whole thing as ‘a sorry state of affairs’ and we have requested it to consider setting up a SIT as the probe seems to be going nowhere,” Mehta said.
The judges also directed the CBI to file the list of all members who have bought flats under ‘benami’ transactions in its status report.
