Bengaluru: The Special Investigating Team (SIT) probing the Lokayukta graft case arrested a clerk attached to the internal security division at the DG & IGP’s office on Wednesday, after a fresh FIR was registered by the officials on late Tuesday night. This would be the ninth arrest and the fourth FIR that have been registered by the SIT that is probing into the in-house graft case.
The clerk, N. Narasimhamurthy, was arrested for allegedly demanding and accepting Rs 5 lakh from a superintendent engineer in Public Works Department in getting the latter’s name dropped from a corruption case registered by the Lokayukta police.
Narasimhamurthy was remanded to police custody till August 25 by the Lokayukta court on Wednesday. SIT officials said that Narasimhamurthy was in constant touch with Lokayukta Y Bhaskar Rao’s son Ashwin Y and had promised the engineer, identified as D. Udayashankar, to help get his name dropped from the chargesheet.
The engineer was one of the 33 chargesheeted in a multi-crore scam relating to civil works in Magadi taluk of Ramanagaram district.
A suo motu case was then taken up by Lokayukta following media reports pointing at the large-scale irregularities in granting contracts to civil works in the Ramanagaram district. The case was then referred to the Lokayukta police wing to investigate.
The chargesheet, which ran into nearly 2 lakh pages, revealed that the government had released Rs 236 crore for road works during 2011-12. Of the total allocation, the Magadi subdivision PWD officials released Rs 137 crore to various contractors. Nearly Rs 57 crore was misused with the state exchequer losing large sums of money.
Udayashankar’s name figured in the chargesheet and in his complaint with the SIT, the engineer alleged that Narasimhamurthy had approached him promising to close the case against him with the Lokayukta police. He demanded Rs 5 lakh which he paid to the clerk to get the work done, the complaint stated.
