Those who moved the bail plea included former trustees of Ludhiana Improvement Trust (LIT) Malkiat Kaur, Vijay Kumar Parti, Surinder Pal Bindra, Sanjiv Talwar, Kala Navkar Jain and Bhupinder Singh Basant. The Sessions Judge G K Rai has issued notice to the Vigilance Bureau for January 7.

The trustees have said that they were innocent and have been falsely implicated by the Vigilance Bureau in the case. “Our names do not figure in the FIR,” they said in the applications.

All these former trustees have relied heavily on the submissions made by the Vigilance Bureau before the Supreme Court of India in the Special Leave Petition (SLP) filed against the grant of anticipatory bail to former Punjab chief minister Captain Amrinder Singh. The trustees claimed that in the SLP the Vigilance Bureau had pleaded that trustees were kept in dark during the decisions taken on the project. They said they joined the investigation as and when called by the officials of VB. “We were never arrested. We were stunned when our names were in the challan filed before the court.”

These ex-trustees have said that the challan had been presented in the court without arresting them in the case. “It shows that they were not required for any custodial interrogation,” they said.