An assistant sub-inspector of the economic offences wing was also arrested for negligence in his probe and not finding any wrongdoing even after weeks of sifting through documents. Police later formed an SIT, which eventually found out how the fraud was carried out with meticulous precision.
In the 1980s, Puran Manchanda – an NRI businessman – bought the 2-acre plot in Begumpur Khatola village of Gurgaon. In March this year, he came to know that his land had been usurped and sold off. Following a complaint by him, an FIR was registered at Badshapur police station for cheating, criminal conspiracy and other IPC sections.
A team led by assistant sub-inspector Pradeep carried out an investigation, but failed to sense anything amiss. But revelations by the SIT that took over the probe after Manchanda met the then police chief – Kala Ramachandran – lifted the veil off a wide network of fraudsters involving a lawyer and a revenue department official based in Delhi.
The four members of the gang who were arrested were identified as Subhash Chand, resident of South City-2; Tony Yadav, a lawyer; Sanjay Goswami, a record keeper at the revenue office in Delhi’s Kalkaji, and Bheem Singh Rathi of Surya Vihar in Gurgaon. They were picked up between September 19 and 26.
Subhash, police said, was aware that Manchanda would rarely visit the city or keep tabs on the piece of land he bought along SPR. He got in touch with Tony some time last year, and collected from the city tehsil office the registry, mutation and revenue documents that Manchanda had signed when he bought the plot.
The two allegedly used a software to digitally copy Manchanda’s signature and his photo from the original documents. They used these to create a fake general power of attorney (GPA), showing that the NRI had transferred the land to Subhash in 1996 – a random year. To make the document look as original as possible, Subhash used an old photo of his on the GPA.
But the gang needed at least two witnesses to sign on the GPA. They created a fictitious lawyer, Sandeep, and put his signature on it. The other “witness” was a retired Armyman called Major PK Mehta. Police later found he died in 2001.
But the more difficult challenge was to update the land record in a government office. In the forged GPA, Subhash and Tony put in a line that the document was signed in the revenue office of Kalkaji, where they had a contact – Sanjay.
In October last year, Sanjay, police said, was paid Rs 5 lakh to collect a file containing all GPAs that were registered in the Kalkaji office in 1996. The idea was to replace an original document with a photocopy of the forged GPA.
But the trio soon realised that if they changed just one document, there was a chance they might get caught later as the forged paper was new while the others had turned yellowish with time. So, they decided to make photocopies of all the documents that were in the file for the year 1996 and replaced them.
To erase the slightest trace of evidence, the gang also tore down all the pages of the record book that had information related to GPAs signed in 1996.
Now that all the “paperwork” was on record and the land had been transferred in the name of Subhash, the gang decided to sell it again to a customer for Rs 6 crore.
The SIT that scanned documents at the Kalkaji office found that all files around 1996 had old but original papers. “Only the one for 1996 had new papers, which were all photocopies. Plus, the pages related to the file for that year were torn in the record. Something, definitely, was fishy,” an SIT officer told TOI.
The cost of the land raised eyebrows as well. “The market value of the land was nothing less than Rs 40 crore. How could they sell it for only Rs 6 crore? That is when we decided to question Subhash, who had transferred the land last,” he added.
Subash spilled the beans on the others. “We are trying to find out if they committed such land frauds elsewhere too,” police spokesperson Subhash Boken said.
