Panchkula: Fondness for high life among the rich and influential led the ninth class passed Sandip Sharma to start a hospital in Sector 20 here. He had never anticipated that the long arms of law would finally catch up with him.
Now, incarcerated in a police station, Sharma’s amazing story of fraud could well be similar to Munnabhai of Bollywood. He worked as a doctor at Karnal and Panchkula, interviewed many postgraduate doctors for employing them in his hospitals at Panchkula and Kurukshetra, and even swindled crores of rupees from banks in the name of his hospitals.
He was so well-connected and influential that a former SP of Panchkula even provided him security even as he was an accused in the bank dacoity at Allahabad Bank in Shahpur village near Ambala cantonment in 2004. How, he managed to receive the huge grants against holding the free medical camps was yet to be investigated, said sources in the police.
Sandip was arrested by a team of Haryana Crime Bureau from Chandigarh. The sources in the police said Sandip, who is very clever, kept on changing his hideouts frequently to dodge the police in cities, including Patiala, Kurukshetra, Delhi, Jaipur, and Chandigarh since January 30 when the police raided his hospital in Sector 20 at Panchkula on the complaint of a civil surgeon.
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