New Delhi: Businessman Robert Vadra, son-in-law of former Congress President Sonia Gandhi, is facing the heat of the Enforcement Directorate’s probe into a money laundering case linked to a land deal in Shikohpur, Haryana.
The case pertains to a land purchase in February 2008 for Rs 7.5 crore by Vadra’s Skylight Hospitality in Shikohpur in Haryana’s Gurugram district.
The mutation process, which usually takes months, was done the next day. Months later, he received a permit to develop a housing society on the land, and the value of the plot increased. He sold it to DLF in June at Rs 58 crore.
Suspecting the proceeds to be part of a money laundering scheme, the ED has been probing the trail behind the windfall gains. The deals were made when Congress was at the helm in the state, and Bhupinder Singh Hooda was the chief minister.
Here is the timeline of the case:
October 2012: IAS officer Ashok Khemka, who was then posted as the Director General of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum-Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the land purchase deal, citing procedural irregularities.
In 2013, an in-house government panel gave a clean chit to both Vadra as well as DLF.
May 2014: The BJP-led government in Haryana set up a Commission of Inquiry under Justice S.N. Dhingra (retd) in 2015 to probe issues pertaining to the grant of a commercial licence to Skylight.
September 2018: FIR registered by Haryana Police against former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, Robert Vadra and others.
January 2019: The Punjab and Haryana High Court quashed the report of the Commission of Inquiry, citing procedural flaws and restrained the Haryana government from making it public. However, it clarified that its order would not prevent the state government from setting up a new Commission of Inquiry on the same subject matter, but the government did not order a fresh Commission of Inquiry.
April 2023: In an affidavit filed before the P&H High Court, the Haryana government submitted that no violation has been found in the transfer of land by Robert Vadra’s Skylight Hospitality to the DLF. “It was reported by the tehsildar, Manesar, Gurugram, that M/s Skylight Hospitality sold 3.5 acres to M/s DLF Universal Limited on September 18, 2019, and no regulation/rules have been violated in the said transaction. [A]s per the report received from the tehsildar, Wazirabad, Gurugram, it was clearly stated that the land in question has not been found in the name of M/s DLF Universal Limited and the land still exists in the name of HSVP/HSIIDC, Haryana,” said the affidavit sworn by Inspector General (Gurugram) Raj Shri Singh.
November 2023: A bench of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, monitoring the timeline of cases against MPs and MLAs, ordered investigation be completed at the earliest, saying that the probe had been crawling for the last five years.
April 8, 2025: Vadra was summoned by the federal anti-money laundering agency but did not appear. A second summons was then issued for April 15.
April 15, 2025: Robert Vadra, the husband of Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, was questioned for around six hours by the ED and was asked to join the probe again. His statement is being recorded under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).
(IANS)
