Fadnavis orders probe into tender process for hotel sale involving Shiv Sena minister Sanjay Shirsat's son

Indian Express

6 days ago

Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Monday announced a high-level inquiry into the tender process for the sale of Hotel VITS in Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar which involved a company owned by Social Justice Minister and Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Shirsat's son Siddhant Shirsat.
Ambadas Danve, Leader of the Opposition in the Legislative Council, raised a calling attention motion on the now-cancelled tender process. 'A company formed in 2024 was allowed to participate in the bid. The hotel bid was fixed at a 2018 rate which was severely undervalued. The cartelisation of the companies led to the acceptance of a tender of a company that did not have three years of income tax returns as required. Will there be action against the officials and the company that won the tender?' Danve said.
Revenue Minister Chandrashekhar Bawankule said, 'We had previously issued six tenders since 2018, but no company came forward. The hotel's value was fixed based on the special MPID (Maharashtra Protection of Investors and Depositors) court.'
The VITS hotel was a property of Dhanada Corporation Limited, listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. In 2016 and 2017, the properties of the company were seized. In a bid to return the money of shareholders, the hotel was put up for auction, but according to the minister, no company responded to the six tenders floated since 2018.
Danve said that M/s Siddhant Material Procurement and Supply won the tender at merely Rs 65 crore and that the current valuation of the hotel was around Rs 150 crore. He mentioned that the company's owner, Siddhant Shirsat, is a minister's son but the minister's 2024 election affidavit showed no property owned by his son.
Danve was joined by Opposition MLCs Anil Parab, Bhai Jagtap, and Shashikant Shinde in seeking action against officials as well as the company's owner.
As Bawankule said the tender process was cancelled and that the new process would take all precautions, the Opposition pressed for the resignation of minister Shirsat.
Shirsat presented his side amid sloganeering in the House. 'The entire process has run through court orders. Every tender has been issued after court orders and not by officials. Nobody came forward six times when the tender was issued,' the minister said, adding that all the allegations were false and baseless.
As the sloganeering continued, Fadnavis said the revenue minister clarified that the process had been cancelled.
'It is important that such cases should have transparency. Therefore, a high-level inquiry will be conducted to probe whether any irregularity has taken place in the entire process,' he said.