MUMBAI, May 21 -- The Bombay High Court on Wednesday quashed the first information report (FIR) against former Mumbai police commissioner Sanjay Pandey for allegedly misusing his position to initiate illegal probes against a businessman and his associates and extorting money from them by threatening to book them in false cases. Alongside Pandey, those named in the FIR were retired assistant commissioner of police Sardar Patil, police inspector Manohar Patil, advocate Shekhar Jagtap, builder Shymsundar Agrawal and two members of the builder's family. The FIR was registered based on a complaint from Sanjay Punamiya, Agarwal's former business partner. In his statement to the police, Punamiya claimed that when he was admitted in Saifee Hospital in 2021, Sardar Patil and Manohar Patil had visited him to record his statement. The officers told him that Pandey, then director general of police (DGP), had sent a message, saying his name would be cleared from the criminal case if he gave a statement implicating Eknath Shinde, Devendra Fadnavis and former Mumbai police commissioner Param Bir Singh in an urban land ceiling scam case. The businessman flatly refused the offer, he told the police. Punamiya also alleged that Sardar Patil and Manohar Patil had acted at the behest of Agrawal and two of his family members while advocate Jagtap had fabricated a government document and misled courts by posing as a special public prosecutor (SPP) in cases registered against Pandey. Pandey, who was granted bail by the Thane sessions court in September 2024, and the other accused had moved the high court in December last year, via separate petitions. In his petition filed through advocate Rahul Kamerkar, Pandey termed the FIR as "part of an ongoing political vendetta against me since my retirement". Pandey, who retired as Mumbai police chief on June 30, 2022, was earlier arrested by the Enforcement Directorate in connection with a money laundering case. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has also registered a case against him and his firm, iSEC Services Pvt Ltd, for illegally tapping phones of National Stock Exchange (NSE) employees for around eight years. "iSEC had received a payment of Rs.4.45 crore for the illegal tapping, which was camouflaged as 'periodic study of cyber vulnerabilities' at NSE," the CBI said. Pandey's firm was awarded an IT audit contract for NSE servers and systems between 2010 and 2014, the CBI said, but it did not flag any breach during that period....