State Govt Yields to Lokayukta, Amends Judicial Probe Terms

Bangalore, Dec 6 (PTI): Seeking to avoid a showdown with the Lokayukta, the BJP government in Karnataka today decided to keep land scams already under investigation by the anti-corruption watchdog out of the purview of the judicial probe it had ordered.

"All the cases where investigation is already in progress by Lokayukta as on November 18, 2010 are excluded from the purview of the judicial commission of inquiry," a government notification said here.

Lokayukta Santosh Hegde had come out strongly against the government for ordering the judicial probe into the land scams when the issue was pending before him. He had maintained that his agency would continue with the inquiry on the complaints it had received about irregularities in allotment of land by the Karnataka Industrial Area Development Board (KIADB) and also over the allegations pertaining to denotification of lands.

The Lokayukta police last week registered FIRs against former housing minister Katta Subramanya Naidu and his corporator son, Jagadish and 10 others in connection with the alleged irregularities in KIADB.

Naidu became the first political victim of the spate of land scams that besieged the B S Yeddyurappa government when he quit the ministry. The Yeddyurappa government which faced a series of allegations of illegal denotification and allotment of lands by KIADB and Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) on November 22 appointed retired high court judge B Padmaraj to head the commission of inquiry into the charges from the period Janaury 1, 1995 to November 18, 2010.

However, the government had to face the ire of Hegde, who questioned the government "unilaterally" ordering the judicial probe into cases which his agency has already been probing and accused it of "ignoring the institution of Lokayukta".

The state government last week sought his advise on finding a solution to the judicial probe row, which has also entered into the portals of the high court with a PIL being filed for a direction on the nature of enquiry to be conducted into the land scams.