Attempts to frame CM, DyCM: Court bars ex-IPS officer’s arrest till Sep 13

MUMBAI: Former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey has been granted interim protection from arrest by the Thane sessions court. Accused of trying to pressurise a builder to frame chief minister Eknath Shinde and deputy chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, the former Indian Police Service (IPS) officer was granted interim protection on the ground that the Bombay high court had granted the same to his co-accused, advocate Shekhar Jagtap.
Additional sessions judge Suryakant S Shinde on Tuesday also adjourned the hearing on Pandey’s pre-arrest bail plea to September 13 after the investigating officer sought time to file a reply. Pandey’s interim protection would be valid till the hearing.
The case against Pandey relates to an FIR registered by the Thane Nagar police on August 26, based on a complaint by Sanjay Punamiya, builder Shymsundar Agarwal’s former business partner. Punamiya alleged that Pandey misused his position, initiated an illegal probe against him and extorted money from him and other businessmen by threatening to book them in false cases.
Those booked in the case include Pandey, Shymsundar Agrawal and two other members of his family, and two police officers – Sardar Patil, who retired as assistant commissioner of police and inspector Manohar Patil.
In his statement to the police, Punamiya claimed that when he was admitted in Saifee Hospital in 2021, retired assistant commissioner of police Sardar Patil and two police officers had visited the hospital to record his statement. The police officers told him that Pandey, then director general of police (DGP), had sent a message for him, saying his name would be cleared from the criminal case if he gave a statement implicating Eknath Shinde, Devendra Fadnavis and former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh in an urban land ceiling scam. He had flatly refused the offer, he told the police.
Punamiya further said that Pandey, Jagtap and their accomplices had hatched the conspiracy in the DGP’s office and Jagtap had fabricated government documents and misled the courts by posing as a special public prosecutor in cases registered against him.
Pandey, who retired as Mumbai police chief on June 30, 2022, was earlier arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with a money laundering case. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has also registered a case against him and his firm, iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, for illegally tapping phones of NSE employees for around eight years.
“iSEC had received a payment of ₹4.45 crore for the illegal tapping, which was camouflaged as ‘periodic study of cyber vulnerabilities’ at NSE,” the agency said, adding that the firm was awarded an IT audit contract for NSE servers and systems between 2010 and 2014, but it did not flag any breach during that period.