Two days after Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) senior leader Ajit Pawar was sworn in as the deputy chief minister amid high political drama in the state, the Anti-Corruption Bureau (ACB) on Monday closed 9 open enquiries (OE) in the Rs 70,000 irrigation scam in which Ajit Pawar has been named.

Parambir Singh, director general of Anti-Corruption Bureau said,“No FIR has been closed.”

ACB officials said that these are routine complaints filedby local farmers, and NGOs, and the closed investigation files are not amongthe 20 FIRs filed into the scam.

ACB officials said that in a scam of such massive proportion where so many FIRs have been filed, a mere order cannot close the entire investigation. “We can close the FIRs only by moving the court,” said an ACB official. Soon after the news broke Shiv Sena’s Priyanka Chaturvedi took toTwitter to slam the chief minister. “From never, never, never to forever,forever, forever. Temporary CM signing his first order to grant clean chit forhis temporary deputy?” the Sena leader tweeted.

The Congress, Sena’s new alliance partner in Maharashtra,too stepped up the attack on CM Fadnavis over the issue.