Famous cases handled by CBI before Sushant Singh Rajput death probe

CBI Director Alok Verma and Special Director Rakesh Asthana were sent on leave after allegations of bribery were exposed and they were questioned by the CBI. Verma was reinstated by the Supreme Court and Asthana’s plea to quash the FIR against him, was dismissed.

A sensitive case which led to the Asthana-Verma row was the Moin Qureshi case. According to what Asthana told the CVC, a Hyderabad-based businessman named Satish Babu Sana, had allegedly paid Verma Rs 2 crore to save himself in the case where Qureshi, a meat-exporter, was being probed by the CBI on charges of tax evasion and money laundering. Asthana said he wanted to arrest Sana, but Verma intercepted and thwarted his attempts to do so. Interestingly, Sana later filed an FIR saying he had paid Asthana to shield him in the Qureshi case.

IRCTC Scam : The CBI had filed a case against Lalu for rigging the tender process when he was Railway Minister. While awarding the contracts of IRCTC hotels, it was revealed that there was a massive scam.

Sterling Biotech Case - In the infamous Sterling Biotech scam, where two men named Chetan Sandesara and his brother Nitin, the directors of Vadodara-based Sterling Biotech had allegedly defrauded half a dozen banks of Rs. 5,700 crore, the CBI had found a few diaries which contained details of payments made by Sterling Biotech to people and firms in January and June 2011, one in which the initials RA were seen. This was assumed to be that of Asthana. However, Asthana maintained that the initials stood for ‘running account

One of the most controversial and sensitive cases that the CBI had to deal with, was the Vijay Mallya bank fraud case, where, interestingly, it was Asthana who headed the Special Investigation Team (SIT), after Mallya escaped from India in 2016 for the UK, after allegedly defrauding several banks of close to Rs 9,000 crore.

A highly sensitised case handled by the CBI is the Rs 3,600 crore AgustaWestland Chopper scam, where allegations of bribes being paid to ‘middlemen’ and even politicians surfaced, after India agreed to buy 12 AgustaWestland helicopters built by the Italian defence manufacturing giant Finmeccanica. Asthana was in-charge of the team looking into the case.

One of the cases being investigated by the CBI is the Robert Vadra-DLF Land Grab scam, where Vadra’s company Sky Light Hospitality, which bought a 3.5-acre plot in Shikohpur village near Manesar reportedly sold it to DLF for Rs 58 crore. When the irregularities in this was later questioned, the Congress government gave a clean chit to Vadra, who is party supremo Sonia Gandhi’s son-in-law.

The CBI has been one of the central agencies investigating the infamous alleged Rs 13,578-crore Punjab National Bank scam, involving diamentere Nirav Modi and his uncle, Mehul Choksi, who have both been absconding since January 2017.