Swati Malliwal Gets Bail In Irregular Appointments Case

Delhi Commission for Women Chief, Swati Malliwal, was granted bail in the irregular recruitment case by a Special Court on Monday. Malliwal had appeared before the court on January 18 in response to a summons issued to her by the court.

Special Judge Hemani Malhotra said that the evidence in the matter was documentary and that there was no need for Malliwal to undergo custodial interrogation. Malhotra then granted her bail after she furnished a personal bond of Rs 20,000 and a surety of like amount, reported Indian Express.

The court questioned the investigating officer and prosecutor Atul Shrivastava if the Anti-Corruption Branch (ACB) was investigating the case according to norms. The IO answered positively to this and told the court that investigation will take some more time to finish. The DCW chief also agreed with the IO and said that she has indeed received a copy of chargesheet and other documents.

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The court had earlier taken notice of the chargesheet filed in the case and summoned Malliwal as accused. It had earlier said that the investigation has not found Malliwal’s associates’ participation in the “illegal practices that were adopted” and ordered the police to further investigate their action in the case and file supplementary chargesheet against them.

In a press statement released by the DCW, Malliwal has said that the workload of the Commission increased manifold and to ease the same and streamline the work, appointments were made on short-term emergent contract basis for three months. There are employees in the Commission who have been working there on short-term contracts since 1998.

“Ms. Swati Malliwal has said that to do the amount of work, the Commission needed the staff for which it also requested the Government in October 2015, but when the staff was not provided, the Commission appointed workers on short-term emergent contract basis for 3 months at a time,” added the statement.

The ACB filed a charge sheet against Malliwal on December 21, 2016, in relation with the alleged irregularities in appointment of AAP workers in the DCW. The investigation began after a complaint was filed in August last year by former DCW chief Barkha Shukla Singh to the ACB. In the complaint, Singh had speculated that several AAP supporters were appointed at high level in the women’s panel by the DCW chief.

The ex-MLA had filed the complaint against Malliwal and Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, saying that many illegal practices were adopted by them to financially benefit supporters of AAP at the expense of the public exchequer.

It was known that the appointments were done without exercising proper guidelines. There was no invitation for applications being sent by the organization to appoint people on higher services. Also, the investigation disclosed that the salaries of these employees connected to Malliwal and AAP were increased because of their closeness to the two entities.

Picture credit- Deccan Chronicle