The Mundhwa land deal has exposed two parallel realities in Maharashtra.

In one, there is a company resolution signed by Maharashtra Deputy CM Ajit Pawar’s son, Parth Pawar; a letter of intent listing a government botanical garden as his private firm’s business address; a written demand to evict a central government institution; and an alleged forcible entry onto the land.

In the other, the FIR and the official inquiry report refuse to name him.

For context, the 44-acre plot at the heart of the controversy, Survey No. 88 in Mundhwa, is Mahar Watan land owned by the state government and occupied since 1955 by the Botanical Survey of India. This land is classified as non-transferable, non-saleable government property. Yet, through a decades-old power of attorney and a series of recent documents, Amadea Enterprises LLP, a private company linked to Parth Pawar, attempted to present the land as privately acquired and tried to take it over. The case triggered two government inquiries and an FIR, but both investigations have avoided naming Parth Pawar.

Parth owns 99 percent of Amadea LLP, his name and signature appear on documents examined by the probe committee, and the fraudulent actions described in the committee’s own report are linked to decisions made by the firm he controls.

Pawar had earlier denied all the allegations against him. “I have not done anything wrong. I have not engaged in any illegal or unethical activity,” he had told a TV channel. 

The trail

On April 22, 2025, Parth Pawar and his partner Digvijay Singh Patil — the designated partners of Amadea Enterprises LLP — met at the firm’s Shivajinagar office in Pune. The two passed a resolution authorising Amadea to apply to the District Industries Centre (DIC) for registration under the IT/ITES category. The document, signed by both Pawar and Patil, stated that information technology was Amadea’s primary business activity. 

That resolution would later appear as an attachment to a controversial sale deed involving 44 acres of government-owned Mahar Watan land in Mundhwa — a parcel that has housed the Botanical Survey of India’s garden since 1955. It raised questions about how Amadea intended to use the DIC process to legitimise a land deal built on a false premise: that the land could be privately acquired at all.

Two days later, on April 24, Amadea submitted a Letter of Intent (LOI) to the DIC. The business address listed in the document was Survey No. 88, the very government plot occupied by the BSI. Amadea had no possession of this land, no legal claim to it, and no right to represent it as its office.

Amadea soon wrote to the Haveli Tehsildar claiming that it had lawfully acquired Survey No. 88 and that the BSI’s lease had ended after the original Watandars deposited the occupancy price in December 2024. The company demanded that the tehsildar initiate the process of evicting the central government institution from the land. 

Then, on June 16, 2025, five men from a private security agency allegedly arrived at the botanical garden and attempted to enter the property. They claimed they had been deployed by a broker who first approached the Watandars in 2006 on behalf of Sheetal Tejwani, whose old power of attorney was later used to execute the sale deed with Amadea LLP. 

There was a clear pattern: a resolution signed by Pawar, an LOI naming the disputed land as Amadea’s address, a written demand to evict a central government body, and a physical attempt to take possession linked to the same broker behind the sale deed.

And yet, when the state inquiry committee headed by Joint IGR (Registration and Stamps) Rajendra Muthe submitted its report on Tuesday this week, Parth Pawar’s name did not appear at all.

The Muthe committee — the first of two probes into the land deal — named only Patil, Tejwani and sub-registrar Ravindra Taru. It said it was confined to examining stamp duty evasion. 

The committee report documents that government land was falsely treated as transferable. Despite this, the parties submitted the deed for registration, and sub-registrar R B Taru wrongly treated the property as movable and used the skip option in e-mutation. It points to how stamp duty of around Rs 21 crore was reduced to Rs 500 using only an LOI (without the mandatory DIC eligibility certificate), how dozens of powers of attorney carried irregularities, and how the buyer ignored a demand notice and registered an altered draft.

Pune-based activist Vijay Kumbhar, who had written to the Chief Minister and Chief Secretary demanding an independent probe, called the report “a complete eyewash”. Kumbhar pointed out that the committee reviewed documents bearing the names and signatures of both Parth Pawar and Digvijay Patil. “This report has been prepared just for the heck of it. They examined several documents that clearly indicate Parth Pawar’s involvement, yet his name does not appear anywhere,” he said.

He also raised questions about the lack of an arrest for Sheetal Tejwani. “Nothing further will come out of this case,” he added.

Newslaundry reached out to Muthe and Pawar for comment. This copy will be updated if a response is received.

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