New Delhi, Jan 16 (IANS): The CBI Thursday registered five cases against eight executive engineers, five junior engineers and a former junior engineer of the Delhi Jal Board (DJB) for conspiring with a private firm to cheat the government.

The engineers caused a loss of Rs.6 crore to the exchequer, it is suspected, by supplying allegedly spurious and cheap motor pumps, gear boxes, spare parts and machinery for use in sewage treatment plants.

The executive engineers have been identified as Banwari Lal Bharti, Islam Khan, J.P. Garg, S.C. Vashistha, Sheesram Singh, G.P. Singh, R.K. Bhalla and J.K. Arora.

The junior engineers are Laxmi Narayan Kulshreshtha, Ashok Sharma, Vijay Gahlot, S.P.S. Rana, Vikrant Vashistha.

The former junior engineer is S.K. Chauhan.

Raman Gupta, proprietor of a private firm Metro Project and Sales Services, has been named in all the five cases.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) conducted searches at 21 places. While some of these were in Delhi, locations in Noida and Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh were also raided by officials in connection with these cases.

"The items were being sold at exorbitant prices, showing the private firm as an authorised dealer of a manufacturing firm on the basis of forged and fake documents," said a CBI official.