Army officers gave away Pune land willingly

India Today Krishna Kumar Mumbai, February 8, 2012 | UPDATED 15:55 IST
The CBI investigations into Pune's Kalpataru land scam have thrown up shocking leads, which hint at the involvement of a select group of army officers in influential positions in all the scams reported from Maharashtra, including Adarsh.
The agency claims that former defence estates officer S.R. Nayyar, allegedly involved in the Kalpataru scandal, played a major role in the Adarsh scam too. Suspected to be involved in several major scams, Nayyar was already under the scanner when the CBI took up the Kalpataru case probe.
Investigating around 30 benami flats in the Adarsh housing society, the CBI ran into Vishal Kedari, who owned on paper one such benami flat. Kedari's trail brought the CBI to Pune where it realised that he could not have purchased the Rs.71-lakh flat since he was unemployed and did only odd jobs. Yet, he had managed to purchase the expensive flat without any bank loan.
Kedari's questioning revealed that he had got Rs.31 lakh as loan from Nayyar, whom he considers his "father figure". The rest of the amount was also given by other "father figures and friends", Kedari claimed.
But the CBI has evidence to show that Kedari was just a front and that the real flat owner is Nayyar himself.
So how did Nayyar manage to pay for the Adarsh flat? Well, the CBI did not have to look far. Nayyar was already under the scanner after he gave away 69 acres of army land to a private builder. He forged land records to show that the land belonged to Kevin Pinto. In return for his "services", Nayyar received Rs.2 crore in bribe in April 2008, which later went into buying the Adarsh flat through Kedari.
The CBI now believes that Nayyar and many of those involved in the Adarsh and Kalpataru scams were part of an army cartel that was involved in such "parcelling" of land worth crores to builders in lieu of money.
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