Former special judge of the CBI/ED court at Panchkula Sudhir Parmar, who was suspended by the Punjab and Haryana high court on April 27, has been booked in a corruption case registered at the anti-corruption bureau (ACB) police station in Panchkula.
His nephew, Ajay Parmar, and real estate company M3M managing director Roop Bansal have also been booked in the case along with others listed as “unknown”. A Haryana ACB team had raided the former judge’s official residence on April 18.
The former judge has been booked under Sections 7, 8 and 11 of the Prevention of Corruption Act and IPC Sec 120 B for criminal misconduct and bribery. The FIR was registered on April 17 after a complaint from ACB additional superintendent of police Kushal Pal Singh on the basis of information gathered through various sources.
Parmar held the rank of additional district and sessions judge and had joined as presiding officer of the CBI/ED court in Panchkula last year.
The FIR claims that Parmar accepted bribes through his nephew, who also is a legal professional and worked for M3M, to show favour to Roop and Basant Bansal, the owners of M3M, and Lalit Goyal of IREO for cases pending in Panchkula’s CBI/ED court.
Attributing the bribery allegations to WhatsApp messages and transcripts of call recordings provided by a source, the FIR highlights an instance when the suspended judge allegedly demands Rs 5-7 crore to help the M3M owners in ED cases and requests the person chatting with him to receive the bribe on his behalf. In the same chat the person says that Rs 5 crore has already been given to Parmar by the accused in the IREO case, the FIR adds.
According to the FIR, Parmar came in contact with the Bansals when he was additional district and sessions judge in Gurgaon. He got his nephew, Ajay Parmar, appointed as a legal adviser to M3M with a pay package of Rs 12 lakh per annum. The nephew’s annual salary was raised to Rs 18-20 lakh after Parmar joined as special CBI judge and special judge for the ED’s Prevention of Money Laundering Act cases in Panchkula.
According to the FIR, Parmar also had pacified the wife of Lalit Goyal and brother-in-law Sudhanshu Mittal over not giving bail to Goyal and that he had convinced them he was allegedly doing the incarcerated Goyal favours in the case.
The FIR also claims that Parmar was planning to extort money from former Haryana bureaucrat T C Gupta, facing trial in a CBI case for actions during his stint as director-general of the town and country planning department. The FIR claims Parmar had roped in a sacked judicial officer, VP Gupta, for this purpose.
The FIR indicates that suspended judge had been on the radar of the Haryana ACB for over four months. The ACB had sought permission from the Punjab and Haryana HC in February to register a case and had attached some records to support its contentions.
The HC gave its go-ahead and the FIR was registered on April 17. A day after registration of the FIR, ACB sleuths had raided the suspended judge’s official residence in Panchkula and other premises in Gurgaon.
Parmar was suspended on April 27 and replaced by Rajeev Goyal as special judge for the Panchkula CBI and ED court.
