Mother-son duo booked for duping contractor of

MUMBAI: The police have booked a 50-year-old woman and her 30-year-old son for allegedly cheating a contractor out of ₹5 lakh by promising him repair work for Tata Memorial Centre in Kharghar, Navi Mumbai. The Dadar police registered an FIR following a police complaint filed by Mahesh Karekar, a 38-year-old resident of Prabhadevi who takes contracts through VJK Facility Services Private Limited.
“He learnt that Tata Memorial Centre’s Advanced Centre for Treatment Education and Research in Cancer (ACTREC) in Kharghar was going to float a ₹4.30 crore contract to repair its buildings. Karekar was new in the business and, since it was Covid-19 and businesses were down, he was really hoping to be awarded the contract, for which he started searching for the contact person,” said a police officer.
Karekar met in 2021 Bharti Ashok Mogal and her son Swapnil at a restaurant in Dadar through a contact. “He learnt that Bharti ran a company, Bharti Earth Movers, in Nashik. She told him that as his company was new, it was not capable of getting the work and she would get the work through her company and then pass on the contracts to him,” said the police officer.
Mogal also asked Karekar to give her ₹10 lakh as a bribe to Tata Memorial Centre officials to get the contract, but he refused to do so because he didn’t have the money, the officer said. Later, Mogal convinced him to settle for a payment of ₹5 lakh, to which he agreed. She had even made a bond paper of ₹100 and wrote on it that she had taken the money to get him the contract.
However, when nothing happened, he went to meet her in Nashik. She then kept on promising it would be done, but there was no progress. That’s when he filed the police complaint, said an officer.
The police booked the mother-son duo under sections 420 (cheating) and 34 (common intention) of the Indian Penal Code.