Former Army Chief  Gen. Deepak Kapoor didnot consider Adarsh Housing Society Building as any threat. He said this to a Two-member judicial commission enquiring Adarsh Housing Society scam.
“It did not occur to me that the building would pose a security threat, because there are a number of buildings of similar height in the area,” Kapoor said.
Kapoor retired as the chief of army staff in March 2010. He applied for membership of the society in 2005 and was later allotted a flat in the society. He, however, surrendered his flat in October 2010 after the scam surfaced.
The defence ministry, in a pending petition in the Bombay High Court, has sought demolition of the 31-storey building in upscale Colaba in south Mumbai, saying it poses a threat.
Kapoor’s statement came in response to a question posed by the two-member judicial commission, comprising former Justice J.A. Patil and former state chief secretary P. Subrahmanyam.
“There are a large number of tall structures both in the vicinity of Adarsh building and Colaba military station,” Kapoor told the commission.
“It was for the authority, which has the power to give clearances for construction, to decide whether any threat was being posed by Adarsh,” he added.
The Adarsh scam involves a prime plot on which the 31-storey building was constructed by the society.
On July 4 the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) filed a 10,000-page charge sheet in the case before a special court here, 18 months after the investigative agency registered a case.
Former Maharashtra chief minister Ashok Chavan has also been named as one of the accused in the charge sheet, along with 12 other accused, including former army officials and bureaucrats.
The Adarsh Housing Society is a cooperative society in the city of Mumbai in India. The origins of the scam go back to February 2002 when a request was made to the Chief Minister of Maharashtra to allot land in the heart of Mumbai for the construction of a housing complex for “the welfare of serving and retired personnel of the Defence Services.”
Over a period of ten years, top politicians, bureaucrats and military officers proceeded to bend several rules and commit various acts of omission and commission in order to have the building constructed and then got themselves allotted flats in this premier property at artificially lowered prices.
As the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India to the President of India in 2011 put it, “The episode of Adarsh Co-operative Housing Society reveals how a group of select officials, placed in key posts, could subvert rules and regulations in order to grab prime government land- a public property- for personal benefit.
“The Central Bureau of Investigation(CBI), the Income Tax Department and the Enforcement Directorate(ED) are in the process of investigating allegations that three former chief ministers, Sushilkumar Shinde, Vilasrao Deshmukh and Ashok Chavan of the state of Maharashtra were also involved in the scam.