In a significant legal decision, the Chhattisgarh High Court has quashed three FIRs against former Additional Director General of Police, GP Singh, which were lodged during the tenure of the previous Congress government. These FIRs pertained to allegations of disproportionate assets, sedition, and extortion.
The decision came from a division bench consisting of Chief Justice Ramesh Sinha and Justice Ravindra Kumar Agrawal, who ruled that the FIRs were maliciously filed against Singh. His lawyer, Himanshu Pandey, confirmed the court’s decision to quash the cases.
GP Singh, a 1994-batch IPS officer, was initially charged by the state’s Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) and Economic Offences Wing (EOW) under the Prevention of Corruption Act. These charges, filed on June 29, 2021, stemmed from preliminary investigations into complaints alleging Singh had accumulated assets that far exceeded his legitimate sources of income.
In the days following the charge, from July 1 to July 3, 2021, the ACB conducted searches at 15 locations connected to Singh, reportedly uncovering movable and immovable assets valued at approximately Rs 10 crore. This discovery led to Singh’s suspension on July 5, 2021. Additionally, based on documents found during these raids, Raipur police registered further cases against him, including charges of sedition and promoting enmity.
A separate extortion case dating back to 2015 was also registered against Singh at the Supela police station in the same year. In January 2022, Singh was arrested in Gurugram, Delhi-NCR, concerning the disproportionate assets case and was subsequently transported to Raipur. Though the Chhattisgarh High Court granted him conditional bail in May 2022, Singh faced compulsory retirement in July of the same year, a decision later overturned by the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) in April, which directed his reinstatement.
