New Delhi: Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha, Rahul Gandhi, was questioned by the Enforcement Directorate for the second consecutive day Wednesday for about five hours in a 2008 Haryana land deal-linked money laundering case.
The 56-year-old businessman termed the ED action a political vendetta and claimed the people of the country do not trust the probe agencies.
He reached the ED office around 11 am, accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress MP from Kerala’s Wayanad. They hugged each other before Robert Vadra entered the office.
Vadra went home briefly for lunch and re-joined the questioning session. He finally left the ED office after 6 pm. Priyanka Gandhi stayed in the visitors’ room of the agency’s office ‘Pravartan Bhawan’ at the APJ Abdul Kalam Road throughout the grilling session.
He has been called again Thursday for further questioning.
Sources said Vadra has been confronted with about a dozen questions during the around 10 hours he spent at the ED office over two days. His statement was being recorded by the federal probe agency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
Vadra asserted that he has always cooperated with investigating agencies and has furnished a multitude of documents, while saying that cases as old as 20 years need closure.
Speaking to PTI, Vadra claimed that he was being targeted by probe agencies as he is part of the Gandhi family and that things would have been different had he been part of the BJP.
The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana’s Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram. The deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre of land in Shikohpur from Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.
A Congress government led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power at that time. Four years later, in September 2012, the company sold the land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.
The land deal got embroiled in controversy in October 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum-Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.
The BJP, which was in Opposition then, had termed the case an instance of corruption in land deals and that of nepotism, hinting at Vadra’s kinship with the first family of the Congress party.
Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.
Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.
PTI
