Court accepts closure report in case against Sena MP Waikar over luxury hotel on civic plot

Mumbai, Nov 16 (PTI) A court here has accepted the closure report filed by police in a case against Shiv Sena MP Ravindra Waikar over alleged violations in the construction of a luxury hotel in Mumbai’s Jogeshwari.

    Judicial Magistrate (Girgoan court) S R Nimse on November 15 allowed the police plea to close the case. The detailed order was not available yet.
    Waikar defeated Shiv Sena (UBT) candidate Amol Kirtikar in the Mumbai North West constituency by only 48 votes in the Lok Sabha elections held in May this year.
    Once a close aide of Sena (UBT) chief Uddhav Thackeray, Waikar joined the Shiv Sena led by Chief Minister Eknath Shinde in March this year.
    He is a former chairman of the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s standing committee, a four-term corporator and MLA from Jogeshwari four times. Waikar was Maharashtra’s minister of state for housing, higher and technical education between 2014 and 2019.

    As per the FIR registered against Waikar, he had entered into a contract with the BMC after getting permission to run a sports facility on a plot in Jogeshwari, a western suburb of the city. The permission was granted when the Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) was in power.

    In early 2023, a notice was issued to him for using the plot, reserved for a public garden, to construct a luxury hotel.
    In July this year, police filed a closure report in the case registered against Waikar, his wife Manisha, and his four close associates.
    The police’s ‘C-summary’, giving a clean chit to the MP, said that the complaint filed on behalf of the BMC was based on “incomplete information and misunderstanding”. A C-summary report is usually filed by police when they conclude that they do not have enough evidence to proceed further in a criminal case.
    Waikar, his wife, his business partners Aasoo Nehlanai, Raj Lalchandani and Prithpal Bindra, and architect Arun Dubey had been booked on the charges of criminal breach of trust, cheating and criminal conspiracy on a complaint filed by BMC sub-engineer Santosh Mandavkar.
    The case was initially registered at the Azad Maidan police station in south Mumbai and the investigation was later transferred to the Economic Offences Wing (EOW).
    It had been alleged that Waikar illegally obtained approval for the construction of a five-star hotel on the Jogeshwari civic plot reserved for a garden.

(This story has not been edited by THE WEEK and is auto-generated from PTI)