New Delhi: AAP leader Saurabh Bhardwaj alleged that BJP has committed a scam of Rs 2,640 crore by not paying for using the MCD hoardings.
The AAP has demanded the BJP to present proof if they have paid for the hoardings. Bharadwaj said that the party will ask for bills through #BillDikhaoBJP campaign if they do not produce the bills or admit to the scam.
"If these hoardings were put up following the due process and were paid for, then there must be bills and receipts for them. If they have paid for these hoardings, all these leaders who glorify themselves on these banners must present the bills and prove that they paid for the hoardings," he said.
"We will run the campaign day and night, tag BJP leaders and ask them to show bills for these hoardings," he added.
The party in a statement said that each of the hoardings which have been used for free actually cost 1 or 2 lakh. Earnings from the fee collected for using the hoardings would have been used to pay the salaries of MCD's officers, doctors, nurses and frontline workers, Bhardwaj said.
The party had sent out teams to do some preliminary findings on the matter. "We have photo evidence with GPS coordinates of all these hoardings. Not a single penny has been earned by the MCD because of it," he said.
"BJP using MCD's paid hoarding sites for free with Adesh Gupta, Ramesh Bidhuri, Meenakshi Lekhi's faces shining on hoardings without paying a penny to the MCD," the AAP leader said.
"The reason behind this scandal is whichever hoarding site was allotted to the vendors, they forcefully got them to surrender the site and did not tender the site ever again. They then had an illicit arrangement with the vendor where half the time they'd put up BJP banners and half the time they'd put up banners of private companies," Bharadwaj explained.
Meanwhile, Delhi BJP spokesperson Praveen Shankar Kapoor said AAP leaders master the art of diverting public attention from core issues.
"AAP leader Saurabh Bhardwaj by raising the political hoardings issue has tried to shift focus from today's burning topic of CBI inquiry being initiated in the Delhi government's DTC bus purchase scam. It will be better if the AAP leader instead of raising frivolous issues, tell the people of Delhi how DTC caravan has been looted in the last seven years," he said.