Mumbai: last July, BJP MLA from Daund in Maharashtra’s Pune district Rahul Kul received a call from a ‘Riyaz Bhai’ who claimed he could secure a cabinet berth for the MLA in exchange of Rs 100 crore.
Six months later, Riyaz Shaikh and six others have been charged in what is now known as the ‘cash-for-birth’ scam.
On January 13 this year, the Anti-Extortion Cell (AEC) of the Mumbai Police Crime Branch submitted a 439-page charge sheet against seven accused in the ‘cash-for-birth’ scam – Riyaz Allahbakhsh Shaikh (41), Yogesh Kulkarni. (57), Sagar Sanghoi (37), Zafar Ahmad Usmani (53), Nandkishore Prasad alias NK Singh (59), Vishal Dilip Kale alias Singh (30) and Pawan Mutreja (40).
The accused were charged with cheating, impersonating a public servant, forgery and criminal conspiracy under relevant sections of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The charge sheet states that the accused are all thugs from Delhi and Maharashtra including Kolhapur, Thane and Mumbai and have several cases of cheating registered against them.
ThePrint reached Mumbai Police Crime Branch officials via call but they declined to comment.
ThePrint also reached out via text messages to Kul, Samadhan Autade (MLA from Pandharpur), and Subhash Deshmukh (MLA from Solapur), three senior BJP leaders who were targeted in the ‘cash-for-birth’ scam, but received no response. Information not found. Response by the time of publication. This report will be updated when a response is received.
Preliminary investigation reveals that the accused were trying to take advantage of the volatile political situation in Maharashtra to make quick money, which had arisen due to the split within the Shiv Sena, which culminated in the collapse of the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA). happened in. ) Government.
In June last year, before joining hands with the BJP, 40 Shiv Sena MLAs led by Eknath Shinde rebelled against party chief and then CM Uddhav Thackeray to topple his three-party (Shiv Sena-NCP-Congress) coalition government. Had done Shinde was sworn in as Chief Minister and BJP’s Devendra Fadnavis as Deputy Chief Minister.
As a result, many of the Shiv Sena MLAs who defected from the Thackeray-led faction were vying for cabinet berths. Similarly, there were many within the BJP – which has been out of power in the state since 2019 – hoping for a cabinet portfolio in the Shinde-Fadnavis administration.
The government was initially formed on June 30 with the swearing in of Shinde and Fadnavis. The cabinet was expanded for the first time in early August, with nine ministers from each of the two parties promising a second expansion soon. However, the second expansion has not happened yet.
Read also: Shinde govt’s Rs 143 cr campaign as BMC polls round the corner – full page ads, radio jingles
‘Senior Politician of Delhi’ – Chor
With their eyes set on a change of government in Maharashtra, the four accused in the case – Vishal Kale, Jafar Usmani, Nandkishore Prasad and Pawan Mutreja – allegedly decided to hatch a plan to defraud the state’s legislators.
In July 2022, he contacted fellow accused Sagar Sanghoi and tasked him with identifying politicians who were interested in cabinet positions. Sanghoi asked again Riyaz Shaikh and Yogesh Kulkarni to carry out the task.
According to Kul’s statement cited in the chargesheet, the BJP MLA said he received a call on his mobile phone on July 12 last year from a ‘Riyaz bhai’ who told him he was “in touch with a senior politician in Delhi”, and Had the MLA been interested, Kul could have got a cabinet post in the Shinde government for Rs 100 crore.
“But then I told him that I am not interested in getting such a cabinet post,” Kul said in his statement.
On 17 July, Kul’s personal assistant Onkar Thorat said that one Riyaz Bhai from Delhi had come to see him and they decided to meet at a five-star hotel in Mumbai. “When I met him that evening in the hotel cafeteria, I was convinced that he was the same guy who had approached me a few days earlier,” said Kull.
During that meeting, Riyaz told Kul that he could get a berth for Rs 90 crore, but would have to pay 20 percent of the total amount (Rs 18 crore) immediately. “I then realized that he was a thug and with the intention of arresting his gang, I asked him to meet me the next day,” the MLA said.
According to his statement, Kul decided to lay a trap for the thugs after talking to senior leaders of his party and lodged a complaint in this regard at the Marine Drive police station in Mumbai. As a result, Riyaz was caught when he came to the five-star hotel the next day to collect the token amount.
A similar pattern was used by the accused to dupe other two MLAs, Autade and Deshmukh.
However, in their statements, both said that they told Riyaz over the phone that they were not interested in ‘buying’ a place in the cabinet. “Then, I did not get any call from him and a few days later, I saw on TV news that he had been arrested,” the MLAs said in their statement to the AEC.
Chhota Shakeel’s brother-in-law cheated
Riyaz’s interrogation led investigators to Yogesh Kulkarni, Sagar Sanghoi and Jafar Usmani, who were also arrested a few days later.
Usmani took them to Delhi-based Nandkishore Prasad alias NK Singh, a mine owner in Jharkhand’s Bokaro district, who he claimed was in touch with senior politicians in Delhi.
Thereafter, a police team arrested Singh from Bokaro.
According to the chargesheet, the police are still on the lookout for accused Pawan Mutreja, whose phone has been “switched off since August”.
The crime branch further said that Singh used a fake visiting card posing as a senior central government employee.
The chargesheet also states that the police relied on call data records (CDRs), WhatsApp chats, SIM cards and audio recordings of phone calls, besides mobile handsets of the accused sent for forensic examination, where the alleged demands were made. .
Interestingly, the mobile chat and call records of the accused also revealed that they extorted Rs 50 lakh from Salim Qureshi alias Fruit, brother-in-law of gangster Chhota Shakeel, on the promise that they would save him from the clutches of the Enforcement Directorate (ED). .
(Editing by Amritansh Arora)