Nagpur: The Nagpur Police on Tuesday, booked lawyer and social activist Satish Ukey, under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act, 1999 (MCOCA), along with six others.
Ukey is currently lodged in Arthur Road Jail in Mumbai.
Nearly nine years ago, Ukey lodged complaints with the Election Commission and filed a petition before the local court against former chief minister Devendra Fadnavis for suppressing information about two pending criminal cases in his 2014 election affidavit.
The Nagpur-based lawyer, who is a vocal critic of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the BJP, had also raised doubts about the “mysterious” death of Judge B H Loya and demanded an SIT probe into it.
Justice Loya, who was hearing the Sohrabuddin Sheikh fake encounter case, in which Amit Shah was an accused, allegedly died of a heart attack in 2014 in Nagpur, where he was attending a wedding.
Ukey and six others were booked under the MCOCA on Tuesday after the divisional engineer of the Nagpur Improvement Trust (NIT), Pankaj Patil, filed a complaint against them, alleging that they had forged documents pertaining to land that was originally owned by one Vitthal Dhawale and later declared excess by the government.
Subsequently, it was allotted to NIT and since the 1990s, it has been owned by the civic authority.
The Ajni police had then booked Ukey and the others under various sections of cheating, forgery and fraud under the Indian Penal Code, following which MCOCA was added to the said offence.
Nagpur police had registered 13 cases against Ukey and his brothers so far.
Last year, the Enforcement Directorate arrested Ukey and his brother Pradip in a money laundering case of over ₹11.5 crore connected with a land grab case in Nagpur.