ACB charge sheet against engineer who amassed Rs 14-cr assets

The Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) has filed a charge sheet against state PWD Executive Engineer Satish Madhukar Chikhalikar, who was arrested in a 2013 bribery scandal here.
The charge sheet running into 2,000 pages was filed in a special court here yesterday against the official who is accused of having amassed assets worth over Rs 14 crore, an ACB press release said today.
Sleuths of ACB had arrested Chikhalikar on April 30, 2013 while allegedly accepting bribe of Rs 22,000 to sanction a bill of Rs 3.69 lakh of a contractor through a PWD branch engineer Jagdish Magan Wagh.
ACB had also registered offences against Chikhalikar and Wagh in Sarkarwada police station under prevention of Anti Corruption Act, 1988 under sections 7,12,13 (1) (d) and 13 (2).

During the probe, the agency had raided various bank lockers and fixed assets besides recovering cash, gold and silver items. It found that the official had assets worth Rs 14,66,17,646 in his name and well as wife Swati Chikhalikar's name, the release said.
The ACB probe had also revealed that Chikhalikar allegedly kept properties like farm lands, plots and houses in the name of his brother-in-law Subhash Ganesh Kulkarni, a resident of Johrapur under Shevgaon taluka in Ahmednagar district and at Taroda in Nanded and Mukund Nagar in Aurangabad.
ACB had also found documents showing that the accused engineers had accumulated assets disproportionate to their known sources of income.

Chikhalikar's postings included Parbhani, Jalna, Latur and Ahmednagar. He owned properties at all these places, besides Navi Mumbai, Pune, Aurangabad and Nanded, where he has a house worth Rs 23.71 lakh in Gujarati colony.