Employment scam: CIDCO lodges FIR, suspends suspect

CIDCO assistant personnel officer Sagar Tapadia has been suspended and is facing charges under multiple sections of the IPC in relation to an employment scam involving 28 bogus employees. The scam was uncovered after masseur Chetan Bawat discovered his income tax had been deducted on the basis that he was a CIDCO employee. Bawat had been attempting to get a job with the corporation for years, having previously approached Tapadia, who was responsible for the hiring process. The bogus employees drew a total of INR2.81 crore ($372,000) in salaries from 2017.

Navi Mumbai: A day after HT reported the employment scam in CIDCO, assistant personnel officer Sagar Tapadia, the prime suspect of the case, was suspended.

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“I have also ordered a departmental inquiry against Tapadia and instructed the officers to lodge a complaint which was done on Wednesday night,” said vice chairman and managing director, CIDCO, Sanjay Mukherjee. Fayaz Khan, manager, personnel department, has registered the case on behalf of CIDCO with CBD Belapur Police Station.

In the scam that started in 2017, the chief vigilance officer has found 28 employees, who have been mentioned on CIDCO’s employee rolls as contractual employees, but are not actually employed with the corporation. “We took the complaint of Chetan Bawat seriously and further proceeded with the inquiry due to which the scam was out,” Mukherjee added.

Bawat, a masseur who works with an app that provides services at home, had found that the Income Tax department had deducted tax from his income showing him to be a CIDCO employee, after which he approached CIDCO to point out the error. This made CIDCO realise that Bawat was shown as a contractual employee and when the vigilance department probed its employee records, 27 other ‘employees’ were found to be bogus.

Bawat’s father was an employee of Aurangabad CIDCO who passed away on duty due to a heart attack in 2000. Since then, Bawat has many times approached CIDCO with his papers including identity proofs, hierarchy certificate and other documents to get his father’s job. “Every time I visited CIDCO, I had to meet Tapadia as he was the one who was in charge of the procedure. My sister got the CIDCO job. That is the only connection I have with CIDCO,” said Bawat.

According to police, Tapadia had used the PAN card of Bawat to make a bank account and forged the signature of Khan to create his appointment letter. A total of 28 bogus employees have been found in the records that drew a total of ₹2.81 crore from 2017. Tapadia was found in an anti-corruption trap in 2019 and during that period no salary was transferred to the ‘bogus employees’, the investigation showed.

Tapadia has been booked under sections 420 (cheating), 409 (criminal breach of trust), 465 (forgery), 468 (forgery for cheating), 471 (using forged document as genuine) and 474 (having possession of forged document) of the IPC. “We would be serving a notice to Tapadia and further investigations are on,” senior police inspector Giridhar Gore from CBD Belapur police station said.