Zeenews Bureau
Mumbai: Retired Lieutenant General GS Sihota will on Monday depose before the two-member commission probing the Adarsh housing society scam in which several Congress leaders and defence officials are under scanner.
Sihota was posted as area commander when AR Kumar, one of the accused in the case, was serving as an officer in the defence estate office. Kumar was allegedly instrumental in giving the controversial No Objection Certificate (NoC) from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) to the state government for construction of Adarsh building.
Besides Sihota, former Army chiefs General Deepak Kapoor and General NC Vij will also appear before the commission later this week. They had been allotted flats in the controversial society when Vilasrao Deshmukh was the chief minister of Maharashtra.
After the controversy came to fore, they gave up the flats.
There are multiple agencies probing the Adarsh scandal, including the judicial commission which was set up by the Maharashtra government after the outcry over the scam. The commission is probing the ownership of the land and whether it was reserved for Kargil War heroes.
The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) recently filed its first chargesheet in the Adarsh housing scam which included big names and one of them being former Maharashtra chief Minister Ashok Chavan.
The others include seven prominent Army officials and six bureaucrats.
The 10,000-page CBI charge sheet was filed before the Registrar of Sessions Court, nearly 18 months after the agency registered a case.
The CBI has registered a case on January 29 last year against Chavan and others which included bureaucrats and retired army personnel.
Chavan had blamed the then principal secretary (revenue) for not bringing details of the membership of the housing society to his notice.
The former Maharashtra chief minister while admitting that he did not read the document fully, blamed his predecessor Vilasrao Deshmukh, who headed the urban development department, for the condition in the letter that talked of allotment of 40 percent flats to civilians.
Chavan had to step down as chief minister after the scam surfaced in 2010. He was the revenue minister during Deshmukh`s first stint as Maharashtra chief minister between 1999 and 2003 during which permissions were granted for the construction of Adarsh society building.
The Adarsh scam involves a prime plot in South Mumbai`s Colaba on which a 31-storey building was constructed by the society.
With PTI Input
