Haryana serves charges on IAS man Khemka for trying to harm Vadra-DLF deal

The Haryana government today served a charge-sheet to IAS officer Ashok Khemka, accusing him of ''illegally'' cancelling the Vadra-DLF land deal and causing damage to the reputation of businessman Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, and that of real estate giant DLF.

The Congress government of Bhupinder Hooda has asked Khemka to respond to the charges within 15 days.

In October 2012, while Khemka headed the Haryana department that handles land registration, he cancelled a Rs57-crore deal between Vadra and DLF on the grounds that it violated basic guidelines in order to grant a windfall gain to Vadra.

Since then he has been transferred several times, most recently last month when he was posted out of the Archives Department, which he took over as director general in April this year. The move in April was the 44th transfer of Khemka's 22-year career in the Indian Administrative Service.

The Haryana government has accused him in three other cases. Khemka has alleged that he is being persecuted for challenging Vadra's deals.

The Hooda government has rejected Khemka's allegation that Robert Vadra was given sweetheart land deals in the state.

This is not the first time Khemka has been served a charge-sheet by the state government either. Earlier, the government had charged him with low sales of seeds when he was the managing director of the Haryana Seed Development Corporation.

Khemka had claimed that the Vadra-DLF deal was worth Rs58 crore to Vadra; and that if all land scams in Haryana were taken into account over the past eight years, their value could be between Rs20,000 and Rs3.5 lakh crore.

He had also claimed that Vadra falsified documents for 3.53 acres of land in the Shikohpur village of Gurgaon. Khemka has been transferred over 40 times in his career for exposing corruption.