NEW DELHI: Supreme Court Thursday took a serious view of a large number of anonymous complaints received by it against judges, amici curiae and counsel after SC turned up the heat on several realtors and builders for misusing subvention schemes, duping homebuyers, delaying projects and refusing to refund the money invested.“We will direct a CBI inquiry into these complaints to find out who are behind it,” said a bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V Mohana, after additional solicitor general Aishwarya Bhati handed over the CBI status report on its investigations into builders who had misused subvention schemes in collusion with bank officials, resulting in homebuyers paying EMIs without any hope of getting their dream homes even after waiting for decades.CJI Kant asked, “In these matters, who are the counsel representing the builders? You (builders) have started sending anonymous complaints to us? You people do not know what kind of stubborn people we are.”Turning to Bhati, the CJI said on the next hearing date, “we will give you another set of complaints. You inquire into them and find out who the people responsible for writing these are. Most of them will be builders, we assume, and, of course, some counsel who have ill-advised them”.“We will catch hold of them. Do you think we will get cowed down by this? We will direct CBI to register an FIR and investigate them. We will take it to the logical conclusion,” the bench said.In April last year, SC had ordered a CBI investigation into the abuse of subvention agreements by builders and banks. At the last hearing, Bhati had informed SC that CBI had registered 50 FIRs and completed probes in 18 of them, filing 17 chargesheets and a closure report before competent courts.She said several bank officials were found to have been in collusion with the builders and were named among the accused in the chargesheets, and the agency had invoked provisions of Prevention of Corruption Act against them. CBI has sought sanctions for prosecuting bank officials from State Bank of India, Bank of India, Uco Bank, HDFC Bank and ICICI Bank.
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SC had directed banks to expeditiously grant sanction for prosecution and said failure to do so would warrant submission of an explanation before the court.SC had also directed CBI to conduct a thorough investigation into allegations of misrepresentation and other irregularities by entities known as “Ozone group in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu; Vivansaa in Bengaluru; Rudra Buildwell Pvt Ltd in Greater Noida; and Omaxe group in Chandigarh”. It had sought a separate probe status report in this regard.
