Robert Vadra appears before ED on day 2 of questioning in land deal case

Robert Vadra, the businessman brother-in-law of Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi, appeared before the Enforcement Directorate on the second straight day on Tuesday for his questioning in a 2008 Haryana land deal linked money laundering case.

He was accompanied by his wife Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, the Congress MP from Kerala's Wayanad. The two exchanged hugs before Robert Vadra went inside the ED office.

He was questioned for about five hours on Tuesday and his statement was recorded by the federal probe agency under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), official sources said.

The session will resume on Wednesday, the sources said.

The 56-year-old Vadra had termed the ED action "political vendetta".

He said he has always cooperated with investigative agencies and has furnished huge amount of documents, stressing that there needs to be a closure in cases which are as old as 20 years.

The probe against Vadra is linked to a land deal in Haryana's Manesar-Shikohpur (now sector 83) in Gurugram.

The land deal of February 2008 was done by a company named Skylight Hospitality Pvt Ltd, where Vadra was a director earlier, as it purchased a 3.5 acre land in Shikohpur from a firm named Onkareshwar Properties at a price of Rs 7.5 crore.

A Congress government led by chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda was in power that time.

Four years later, in September, 2012, the company sold this 3.53 acre land to realty major DLF for Rs 58 crore.

The land deal got into controversy in October, 2012 after IAS officer Ashok Khemka, then posted as the director general of Land Consolidation and Land Records-cum- Inspector-General of Registration of Haryana, cancelled the mutation of this categorising the transaction as violative of state consolidation Act and some related procedures.

The opposition Haryana BJP then had called this case an instance of "corruption" in land deals and that of "nepotism" hinting at Vadra's kinship with the first family of the Congress party.

Haryana Police had filed an FIR to probe this deal in 2018.

Vadra has been questioned multiple times by the federal probe agency in two different money laundering cases earlier.