Nagpur/Mumbai: The Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Saturday was left red-faced when a senior clerk in the Home Department was caught red-handed by Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) sleuths while he was demanding and accepting a bribe of Rs 5,000 from a Navi Mumbai-based security agency owner. The senior clerk has been identified as Bhimsen Devnath Tandel. The nabbing of the senior clerk by ACB has put Fadnavis in a major embarrassment as the Home Department is headed by him.
The clerk Bhimsen Tandel was nabbed accepting Rs 5,000 at his Mantralaya office on Friday.
It is significant to recall that on April 2, the Chief Minister Fadnavis had intervened to get a corrupt Mantralaya official arrested. Ambadas Kadam, Legal Assistant with the Law and Judiciary Department was arrested for demanding a bribe from an advocate from Vidarbha.
But rooting out corruption might well prove to be a difficult task. The senior clerk in Home Department Tandel was demanding a bribe of R10,000 from a security agency owner from Kopar Khairane, Navi Mumbai.
The security agency owner had applied for a licence with the Home Department, but later learnt that local Police Commissioners had the authority to issue licences to security agencies. He wanted to withdraw his application from Mantralaya, for which Tandel allegedly demanded R10,000 from him.
“As the complainant did not wish to pay the accused Tandel, he approached us and we asked him to negotiate and they finally reached (a sum of) Rs 5,000, after which the clerk was arrested after being caught red-handed accepting the bribe amount in Mantralaya,” said an ACB official.
