Rubbishing the allegations of nepotism and corruption in PWD tender allotted to Vinay Bansal, the relative of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) chief spokesperson Saurabh Bhardwaj on Friday said that the tender was allotted to Bansal even before Kejriwal took over as Chief Minister.
Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) on Thursday arrested Vinay Bansal, son of Kejriwal’s brother-in-law Surender Bansal, in an alleged PWD scam.
The AAP said that elections in Delhi were held on February 8, 2015, results came on February 10 and Kejriwal became CM on February 14.
“While the tender for the construction of “nullah” was floated on January 6 against which eight companies, including that of Bansal’s applied. His bid being the lowest among all, he was allotted tender on January 22 by a notice of Executive Engineer,” said Bhardwaj. “How can he be involved in the episode in anyway if the tender was allotted even before he took over as CMIJ,” he added.
The AAP spokesperson also brushed aside the possibility of any corruption in the construction work of “nullah” advocating that its quality was inspected by a team of expert engineers from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT)-Roorkee who in their report have allegedly found that there is no anomaly in construction.
“IIT-Roorkee is a prestigious institute under the Central Government and is well known for quality check work. They came for the quality check of nullah on the request of PWD and collected several samples. They have found that there is nothing anomalous in the construction and it has been mentioned by them in the report submitted,” he said.
Bhardwaj cited the report by “Shree Ram laboratories” which did through inspection allegedly at the request of ACB after taking more than two dozen samples, have allegedly found “no corruption” in the material used in construction of the nullah.