THE SOUL OF THE BUSINESS
A PRIVATE   FAITH MADE DANGEROUSLY PUBLIC 
The Making of a Paper
 By SHOMA CHAUDHURY
 In Gratitude
 By TARUN J TEJPAL

Maharashtra DGP PS Pasricha has accumulated properties worth crores and undervalued them in his returns. The state’s seniormost cop is also impeding inquiries against shady builders with underworld connections. Ashish Khetan reveals the details in this painstaking exclusive

In the list of India’s most sensitive and important police posts, the Director General of Police (DGP) of Maharashtra would figure somewhere near the top. The state and its capital, Mumbai, the country’s financial nerve centre, have long been waging a battle against the twin menace posed by terrorists and the underworld.

Gangsters, operating from foreign shores, and terrorists, spreading their tentacles across the country, make the job of the police in Maharashtra critical to national security. Under these circumstances, the chief of the state police’s responsibilities assume huge significance.

It is therefore disheartening that the incumbent Maharashtra DGP, instead of battling the builder-mafia nexus, has become the de facto guardian of many unscrupulous builders and developers who are in cahoots with the Mumbai underworld. In a month-long investigation, Tehelka has unearthed clinching evidence that DGP PS Pasricha has acquired a lot of real estate in the 35 years he has served as a police officer. Both the number of properties he owns and the means he employed to acquire them are shocking. The evidence Tehelka gathered shows the DGP has been dealing with shady contractors and property dealers across the state. Pasricha has been so heavily involved in buying and selling property since 2000 that he could be mistaken for a property dealer instead of Maharashtra’s top police official.

	AURANGABAD BUYER SAYS HE PAID THE DGP RS 3.5 CRORE PASRICHA SAYS HE GOT RS 2.25 CRORE AREA: 3.25 ACRES
Current Value 10 Crore

As he rose through the ranks, Pasricha used his position and power to build his own mini real-estate empire. A property developer in Aurangabad told the undercover Tehelka journalist how he gave Pasricha over Rs 1.5 crore in black money against a property deal struck with him on the day he took charge as Mumbai Police Commissioner in 2004. A builder in Mumbai has been recorded on hidden camera saying, “Pasricha sahab is my guardian.” He then explains how the DGP soft-pedalled an investigation into irregularities committed by him in a construction project in Mumbai. The builder returned the favour — he sold Pasricha the top floor of the complex at half the market rate.

Tehelka has also found damning documentary evidence of Pasricha killing a police investigation into the suspected connection between Evershine Builders and the Dawood Ibrahim gang. Six months after Rajkumar Ramchandra Ludhani, owner of Evershine Builders, escaped scrutiny on the intervention of the DGP, he sold Pasricha the 25th floor of his upcoming residential tower in Andheri for an initial payment of just Rs 50 lakh. The property is currently valued at over Rs 5 crore. In 2001, when Pasricha was Mumbai’s Joint Commissioner (Law and Order), he bought 8,000 sq ft of built-up area in the basement of a shopping complex in Kolhapur. In his Income Tax returns, he showed the cost of property as Rs 1.16 crore. (Tehelka had access to his I-T returns from 1999-2000 to 2001-02.) However, according to the existing market rates, the property was valued at over Rs 2 crore.

KOLHAPUR MARKET VALUE WHEN BOUGHT: RS 2 CRORE WHAT PASRICHA PAID: RS 1.16 CRORE AREA: 8,000 SQ FT
	Current Value 6 Crore

Pasricha’s neck-deep involvement in the murky business of real estate — where transacting major portions of deals in black money is virtually the norm — raises serious issues about his conduct. Prima facie, all the properties Pasricha bought and sold in the last several years seem to be grossly undervalued in his declarations to the I-T department and the state government. For instance, as per the sale agreement and Pasricha’s own statement, he sold a 3.25-acre plot in Aurangabad to one PH Panhale in 2003 for Rs 2.25 crore. But Panhale and his agent Prahlad Rathod told Tehelka they paid Pasricha around Rs 1.5 crore in black money in addition to giving him a cheque of Rs 2.25 crore. The Tehelka reporter met Panhale posing as a prospective buyer interested in the plot. During the conversation, Panhale and Rathod also name one Raju Manvani, a Mumbai property broker, as being close to Pasricha. They say they had paid Manvani the cash involved in the transaction on Pasricha’s instructions. Talking to Tehelka, the DGP acknowledged his friendship with Man-vani, but lost his cool when asked about the exact nature of their relationship.

The list of properties across Maharashtra in which Pasricha invested over the years is long. Tehelka unearthed evidence showing the details of his dealings with some builders:

THE EVERSHINE LINK

‘All other bureaucrats and police officers have flats but I have zero flats. Only one is under construction’

Evershine Builders is a large Mumbai-based construction company with many projects in the city’s western suburbs. In November 2004, the Thane district police arrested its owner, Rajkumar Ramchandra Ludhani, after another builder filed a complaint that Dawood Ibrahim’s men were coercing him to vacate a plot in favour of Ludhani.

The police also found an audiotape recording in which Chhota Shakeel’s henchman Fahim Machmach was threatening the complainant, Sham-sunder Agrawal, over the phone. In the tape, Machmach asks Agrawal to hand over a plot on the outskirts of Mumbai to Ludhani. On November 5, 2004, the investigating officer, Kishore Gayke, arrested Ludhani on charges of having underworld links.

Ludhani was arrested and brought to the Bhayander police station. Entries of his arrest were made both in the station diary and the arrest diary maintained at the station. Gayke later wrote in his case diary that, after being arrested, Ludhani started bragging about his relations with senior police officers. Soon after, Manvani came to the station and told Gayke he was Ludhani’s relative. When Gayke was taking Ludhani to present him before a magistrate, Manvani intercepted his vehicle and tried to thrust his cell-phone on the cop telling him that Thane Rural Superintendent of Police (SP) Ramrao Pawar was on the line and he should speak to him before going ahead. But Gayke refused to take the call.

	JUHU, MUMBAI MARKET VALUE WHEN BOUGHT: RS 4.7 CRORE WHAT PASRICHA PAID: RS 1.35 CRORE AREA: 4,700 SQ FT
Current Value 7 Crore

However, when he reached the Thane court, Gayke was accosted by a dozen Crime Branch officers who prevented him from going in and took him and Ludhani to Pawar’s office in the adjoining block. According to Gayke’s entry in his case diary, Pawar blasted him for arresting Ludhani against the wishes of the then Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) chief PS Pasricha. When Gayke tried to explain that the allegations against Ludhani were serious and it was a fit case to be tried under the stringent Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, Pawar replied, “Pasricha has rung me up at least 50 times, telling me to release Ludhani immediately. An old anti-corruption case against me is pending and now that he is the DG of the Anti-Corruption Bureau, he could ruin my life. You know who you are taking up cudgels against? Pasricha is a big man.”

Pawar then instructed Gayke to return to the police station and change all the station records in which he had made entries of Ludhani’s arrest under non-bailable sections of the Indian Police Act. A few of Pawar’s officers then escorted Gayke, Ludhani and Manvani to Bhayander police station and, as per Pawar’s instructions, a cobbler was summoned and told to unbind the station diary. The three pages where entries related to Ludhani’s case had been made were taken out and new pages inserted in their place.

ANDHERI, MUMBAI MARKET VALUE WHEN BOUGHT: RS 5 CRORE WHAT PASRICHA PAID: RS 50 LAKH AREA: 6,980 SQ FT
	Current Value 6.5 Crore

Over a dozen police officers including Gayke were told to make fresh entries with no reference to Ludhani’s arrest under non-bailable sections of the IPC. Gayke, however, managed to retain the three original pages of the station diary; these are now with Tehelka. After doctoring the station diary, Pawar’s officers tried to unstitch the arrest diary. When the cobbler failed to remove the relevant pages, the policemen struck out the more serious charges against Ludhani and showed him as having been arrested under CRPC 151, a minor section which deals with preventive arrest, and under which the accused has to be released within 24 hours.

Ludhani was allowed to leave and the case against him closed. In this manner, a serious case of a builder’s suspected collusion with the underworld was given a quiet burial. Some months after this incident, Pasricha booked four flats on the top floor of the Evershine Cosmic residential tower in Andheri in Mumbai, being constructed by Ludhani. Documents with Tehelka show that the four flats total area is 6,980 sq ft and that Pasricha booked them in his name on July 18, 2005, against an initial payment of Rs 50 lakh. These documents also show that others who booked the same flats were charged at market rates, which were higher than what Pasricha was charged. Also, whereas other buyers have paid many more installments since the initial booking, the DG has not paid a single rupee over the initial amount.

The 25-storey tower is currently under construction and, at current market value, the booking rate is over Rs 7,000 per sq ft. Pasricha told Tehelka that he invested Rs 50 lakh in the property with the money he got from selling off two of his flats in Mumbai’s Worli area in 2004. He also said that he had saved Ludhani because the investigating officer was trying to extort money from him. “As DG of the Anti-Corruption Bureau, I would have helped anybody who approached me,” he told Tehelka. However, in this instance, giving help meant tampering with police records and suppressing a criminal investigation. It is too much of a coincidence that Pasricha soon bought prime property at a fraction of the market rate from the very same builder whom he had “saved” from “extortion” by a police officer.

IN WITH AN SRA SCAMSTER

‘Ask my juniors about my integrity. Who will know better than my own juniors of all ranks, right from constable to IG’

Tehelka found that Pasricha has invested Rs 50 lakh in his wife’s name in a slum rehabilitation project in Juhu. “The market rate was Rs 4,000 per sq ft in Juhu in 2004. I paid half, Rs 2,000 per sq ft, as the booking price and bought the flat,” says Pasricha. The plot size is 2,835 sq ft and, by Pasricha’s own admission, he paid Rs 2,000 per sq ft, which brings his total dues to over Rs 56 lakh. However he paid only Rs 50 lakh by cheque. The then market rate in the area was Rs 7,000 per sq ft.

Clearly, the builder had obliged the DG by selling him property at a fraction of the market rate. Pasricha also forgot to mention that Rs 85 lakh has been invested in the same slum rehabilitation project in the name of his son, Puneet Pasricha. As a result, the entire top floor of the building, which is currently under construction, is in the name of the Pasrichas. And it so happens that this project is also under a cloud over allegations of serious irregularities. Shailesh Sawla, the builder developing the project, has been accused of faking the real number of slum-dwellers in the area by forging documents. The local mla complained to the Chief Minister that Sawla had inflated the number of families living in the slum from 180 to 250 so that he could develop more land and then sell it in the free market.

Under the Mumbai slum rehabilitation scheme, the more slum-dwellers a builder rehabilitates, the more land he gets to develop commercially.

Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh, who is the chairperson of the Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA), referred the complaint to the Mumbai police’s Economic Offences Wing (EOW). After an initial inquiry, the EOW found that Sawla had shown 68 slum tenements in the name of celebrities and “influential personalities” like film star Sanjay Khan and some retired army officers. An FIR was registered against Sawla in October 2006. At this juncture, Sawla reveals, that DGP Pasricha started pressuring the EOW officers to softpedal the investigation. Sawla told Tehelka’s undercover reporter that Pasricha was like family to him and was “his guardian”. He has been recorded on hidden camera saying that Pasricha has been “helping him” in the investigation and had asked the Additional Commissioner, EOW, to “take care” of Sawla. Sawla says that the police have assured him they will file a report that shows him in a positive light. He also mentions that Pasricha had spoken to the chief minister, asking him to allow Sawla to complete the project. It is not surprising then that no action has been taken against Sawla, even six months after the FIR was registered. When contacted, Sadanand Datte, the Additional Commissioner, EOW, said the investigation was still on. Datte refused to comment on Pasricha’s stake in the project.

COP OR PROPERTY DEALER?

‘Tell me, tell me, which other properties do I have? You seem to be making an inventory’

In the course of its investigation, Tehelka found that Pasricha was in the business of buying and selling property on a regular basis. In 2000, he sold a flat allotted to him by the government in the posh Dilwara society in Churchgate. He sold the flat to Dr SD Karnik, then chairman of the Maharashtra Public Service Commission, and his daughter, who was working in Abu Dhabi. Karnik was later arrested and prosecuted in a multi-crore cash-for-jobs scam. “All other bureaucrats and police officers have flats... but I have no flats… Today I have zero flats…One flat of mine is under construction in New Bombay…I sold my Dilwara flat for Rs 1.4 crores in 2000,” Pasricha told Tehelka.

Pasricha claims that he reinvested this money in purchase of 8,000 sq ft of built-up area in a shopping complex in Kolhapur. “Out of the 1.4 crores, I paid 1.3 crores for the Kolhapur property,” says Pasricha. However, at the time the market value of the property was over Rs 2 crore. “I added Rs 15-20 lakh of my savings and added it to the Rs 10 lakh left over from the Dilwara proceeds. Then, I and my son took a bank loan of Rs 61lakh and bought two flats in Lady Ratan Tower in Worli in July 2001,” says Pasricha. The two flats, measuring 760 and 1,135 sq feet, were in a Worli slum rehabilitation project undertaken by Lokhandwala Builders. In his Income Tax returns, Pasricha has showed the cost of the flats as Rs 35 lakh and Rs 53 lakh respectively. But the combined market rate for the two flats was over Rs 1.5 crore.

	WORLI, MUMBAI MARKET VALUE WHEN BOUGHT: RS 1.5 CRORE WHAT PASRICHA PAID: RS 96 LAKH AREA: 1,895 SQ FT
Current Value 1.25 Crore

Pasricha rented out a flat to Bennett Coleman and Co Ltd and another to one Nitin Shah, a chartered accountant. “I bought these flats as I wanted to save income tax. After selling off the flat at Dilwara, I wanted to save on capital gains. Then, with the rent I was earning from the Kolhapur property and from the Worli flats, I paid off the bank loan. After three years, I sold off the Worli flats and got Rs 1.25 crore,” Pasricha told Tehelka. The going market rate for the flats in 2004 was at least Rs 2.25 crore.

This Tehelka reporter approached the property cell of the Kolhapur Municipal Corporation and took them to the premises of Pasricha’s Kolhapur property, which has been rented out to tata Indicom. The two office administrators there said the monthly rent paid to Pasricha was between Rs 2 to 2.5 lakh. The property cell officials also said that Pasricha had not paid any property tax after he bought the property. The property tax amounts to over Rs 20 lakh per year and the total amount Pasricha owes comes to over Rs 1.2 crore.

In 2004, Pasricha sold the 3.25-acre plot in Aurangabad which was bought in the name of his wife, son and daughter in the late 1980s. When asked, Pasricha initially refused to reveal the buyer’s name. “Why should I tell you the buyer’s name… that was my wife and my children’s property. They had bought it from their savings,” he said, forgetting to mention that his children were in school when it was bought.

PASRICHA’S OTHER DEALS
»	A 485-SQUARE METRE RESIDENTIAL PLOT IN NASHIK
»	A 3,600-SQUARE METRE PLOT AT NERUL
»	A ONE-ACRE INDUSTRIAL PLOT IN PUNE
»	TWO OFFICES IN BRAHMA BUILDING AT BELAPUR
»	A FLAT IN DILWARA HOUSING SOCIETY IN CHURCHGATE

Pasricha then claimed that it was his father-in-law who had bought the property for his wife and children. After persistent questioning, he revealed the buyer’s name. “Keep it to yourself. There was somebody by the name of Panhale to whom I sold the property… for Rs 2.25 crore,” he said. Panhale’s agent Rathod and, later, Panhale himself told Tehelka they bought the land from Pasricha at Rs 1 crore per acre, of which 40 percent was paid in cash. Tehelka also got access to documents of the anti-corruption inquiry initiated against Pasricha in 2002. According to these papers, he owned commercial space worth Rs 20 lakh in a building called Brahma in Belapur, Navi Mumbai. “I have already sold the property in Brahma six to seven years back,” said Pasricha. Also listed in the acb file are a residential plot at Nashik and an industrial plot in Pune, both in Pasricha’s name. Pasricha claimed he had bought both these a long time ago.

The DGP of any state should inspire awe for professional correctness. In fact, for unimpeachable integrity. Pasricha is well within his rights to buy properties provided the deals are all above-board and legal. That, however, is not the case here. Former Cabinet Secretary TSR Subramanian says, “The all-India service rules do not allow a bureaucrat to be involved in property dealings.” The details of every deal Tehelka has unearthed reveal that Pasricha profited by colluding with builders with unsavoury reputations and by abusing his position as a police officer. Unalloyed greed made the guardian of the law become the guardian of builders with underworld connections.

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