Shweta Tambade
The Delhi Court granted relief to former cricketer and a BJP politician Gautam Gambhir in a case of criminal breach of trust and cheating.
After the discharge by additional chief metropolitan magistrate Dharmender Singh, the matter would be now heard by some other judge.
In September last year, the police had filed a supplementary charge sheet against Gautam Gambhir, a BJP MP from East Delhi, and several others under various sections, including 406 (criminal breach of trust), 420 (cheating), and 34 (the criminal act is done by several persons in furtherance of the common intention), of the IPC.
The FIR was filed after 50 flat buyers complaint that they had booked flats in a real estate project in Indirapuram, Ghaziabad in 2011 that did not take off.
Advocate Paritosh Budhiraja, counsel for Gambhir, said that since Gambhir was the brand ambassador, he did not have any concern with the day to day affairs of the brand.
Gambhir was the Additional Director in the company for a short time.
The counsel said that the police did not find any evidence against Gambhir in the first charge sheet. No evidence was found in the supplementary charge sheet.
The former cricketer was a brand ambassador, as well as a director of the joint project of Rudra Buildwell Realty Pvt Ltd and HR Infracity Pvt Ltd, against which a case was filed in 2016 for allegedly duping people of crores of rupees on the pretext of booking apartments in the housing project in 2016.
The police, in the charge sheet, had alleged that “the developers executed Builder Buyer Agreement with the victims in June-July, 2014 even after the expiry of sanctioned building plan on June 6, 2013. Developers have been demanding and collecting money from the victims unauthorizedly even after June 23, 2013.”
Apart from Gautam Gambhir and the firm, the charge sheet also mentioned the names of its other promoters – Mukesh Khurana, Gautam Mehra, and Babita Khurana – as accused.
The complainants claimed that “the project was extensively promoted and advertised and Gautam Gambhir, as the brand ambassador, helped in attracting and inviting buyers to invest in the project.”