Delhi deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia on Saturday claimed that a team of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) carried out searches at his office.
In a tweet, the senior Aam Aadmi Party leader said, “CBI has reached my office again today. They are welcome.”
“They raided my house, raided my office, searched my locker, even searched my village. Nothing has been found against me and nothing will be found because I have not done anything wrong. Sincerely worked for the education of the children of Delhi,” he wrote in Hindi.
However, sources in the CBI said that the agency is not carrying out any raid at his office, calling the visit “a routine process in connection with its probe into allegations of corruption in the now-scrapped excise policy for 2021-22.
The sources cited above said that the visit was aimed at collecting some documents from his office, adding that a notice was issued to his office located at the Delhi Secretariat.
On August 17 last year, the CBI booked Sisodia, considered the second-most-powerful leader in the AAP after convenor Arvind Kejriwal, was named as accused number 1 in the case. Two days later, CBI sleuths carried out searches at the premises of Sisodia.
Besides Sisodia, the CBI has named 14 others, including three public servants —former excise commissioner Arva Gopi Krishna, former deputy excise commissioner Anand Tiwari and assistant commissioner (excise) Pankaj Bhatnagar.
The CBI case is based on a complaint received from Delhi Lieutenant Governor Vinai Kumar Saxena, who flagged irregularities in the framing and implementation of the Delhi excise policy.
Some private persons, including Vijay Nair, the AAP communication in-charge and former CEO of Mumbai-based Only Much Louder; Sameer Mahendru, MD of Indospirits; Manoj Rai, a former employee of Lucknow-based Pernod Ricard; Amit Arora, director of Gurgaon-based Buddy Retail Private Limited; Dinesh Arora, Delhi-based Mahadev Liquors; Sunny Marwah, an authorised signatory of Mahadev Liquors; Arun Ramchandra Pillai of Karnataka’s Bangalore and Arjun Pandey of Gurgaon, have also been named in the CBI FIR.
Earlier, the agency arrested Nair and Hyderabad-based Abhishek Bonipally in the case.