The Punjab Vigilance Bureau (VB) on Tuesday arrested a man for extorting money from a municipal engineer by threatening to lodge a corruption complaint with the bureau against him.

A spokesperson of the VB said the accused, identified as Lal Chand Bansal, resident of Gugga Madi colony, Kharar, SAS Nagar (Mohali) district, was blackmailing Baldev Raj Verma, a municipal engineer (Patiala), with a threaten to lodge a complaint against him with the bureau.

The officer approached the bureau with a complaint against Bansal for blackmailing him with the threat to file a complaint against him. He informed the VB that the accused was asking him to pay up Rs 2 crore lest he would register a complaint against him with the bureau.

The municipal engineer accused Bansal of demanding Rs 50 lakh cash and property worth Rs 1.50 crore from him.

“The complainant officer recorded the entire conversation in this regard as he didn’t want to pay the up the extortion amount. However, he falsely promised to pay him a token amount of Rs 5 lakh,” the spokesperson disclosed.

The same accused had allegedly lodged two complaints in 2015 and 2017 against Verma, but the VB had filed both of them after an inquiry.

The spokesperson said after preliminary investigation into the complaint, a VB team from its flying squad laid a trap and arrested the accused Lal Chand near TDI colony, Kharar while accepting tainted money amounting to Rs 5 lakh in the presence of two official witnesses.

He said after the arrest of the above accused, the VB team searched his house and recovered about 70 files, various documents and a cash counting machine besides a laptop which contained soft files regarding complaints lodged against different government officials.

The accused was also booked earlier by the police in two different deception cases.

During preliminary investigation, it has come to light that the said accused used to file RTI queries and lodge complaints against public servants and later withdraw such applications by submitting a declaration that he didn’t want to pursue the complaint against the concerned officials.

The spokesperson said prior to this, the accused had submitted a declaration in the Municipal Council, Kharar that he didn’t want any information under RTI against the complainant, the municipal engineer Verma.