MCD JE, wife jailed, property confiscated
A city court sent a junior engineer of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) to jail for four years for possessing disproportionate assets and also convicted his wife for abetting the crime.
Special judge Pradeep Chaddah jailed MCD junior engineer (west) Sheel Chand Goel for four years and his wife Sadhna for two years, lamenting that “the menace of corruption has touched all-time high.”
“Convict Goel, who was employed with MCD misused his office, amassed wealth and committed criminal misconduct,” the court said, imposing a fine of `1 lakh on him and adding, “Because of people like him the entire city has been defaced. Not a brick can be laid without active blessings of MCD.”
Goel was caught accepting bribe in 2006. A subsequent search of his residence revealed that he had amassed wealth worth `18.73 lakhs between 1984 and 2003, grossly disproportionate to his known sources of income.
The CBI, in its chargesheet, said Goel’s financial status changed after he joined MCD and he acquired properties in the name of his wife Sadhna, who despite being a housewife with no source of income, began filing wealth tax and income tax returns in her name and in names of her children from 1988 to 1995 only to legitimise her husband’s ill-gotten wealth.
On the prayer of the CBI counsel Praneet Sharma that the property acquired by the engineer illegally through corrupt means be confiscated, the court directed the agency to confiscate the family’s property in northwest Delhi as “otherwise the convict would be at liberty to enjoy the fruits of his illegal activities after carrying out his sentence.”
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