Robert Vadra-DLF land deal: Important file pages missing

IAS officer Ashok Khemka has sought registration of an FIR after an RTI filed by him found that two pages of a file pertaining to the controversial DLF-Robert Vadra deal are missing from government records.

Admitting that the pages were missing, Chief Secretary PK Gupta said an internal inquiry has been instituted in the matter and efforts are on to reconstruct the file.

Khemka, who had over two years back cancelled mutation of the land deal between Robert Vadra's company and DLF, said, official notings pertaining to setting up a three-member committee by the previous Hooda government, which gave clean chit to Vadra's firm, are "missing" from the main file, Demanding that a case be registered in the matter, Khemka said on Friday that "it is a serious matter and it should be probed. How can the notings suddenly be untraceable".

"The file noting is a very important piece of record which would establish that the three members were specifically appointed to an illegally constituted Committee by the then political executive, where the only remedy to an aggrieved party was to file a writ petition in High Court, with the pre-determined objective to accord clean chit to black-marketing of colony license by M/s Skylight Hospitality, a company belonging to Robert Vadra, and to discredit my action of cancelling the land mutation from M/s Skylight Hospitality to M/s DLF," Khemka charged in a letter yesterday to the Haryana Chief Secretary.

The two pages with notings on the previous Congress government's decision to constitute an official probe committee that later gave clean chit to Vadra and DLF of any wrongdoing in Gurgaon land deal are untraceable, the present State Government has said responding to Khemka's RTI plea.

State Public Information Officer D R Wadhwa, in an affidavit before State Information Commission a week back, has mentioned that despite efforts to trace out Page No 1 and 2 of the noting of the file, these could not be traced and therefore, these pages, could not be provided to Khemka.

The 48-year-old IAS officer, whose action to cancel the mutation in October 2012 had raised a political storm, had sought the documents to ascertain how the official committee, which later on gave clean chit to Vadra, was constituted.

The Chief Secretary on his part said that it was a fact that a page of the file was missing.

"This is a fact that one page of the file is missing, which is two numbers - 1 and 2. I have seen this filed today itself and this page is missing. For this we are instituting an inquiry if somebody is guilty, we will take action," he said.