Mumbai, Jun 20 (IANS): Crying foul over the alleged financial irregularities being perpetrated in the civic body, the Opposition Shiv Sena (UBT) will take out a protest march to the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) on July 1, party president and ex-chief minister Uddhav Thackeray said here on Tuesday.

The march will be led by ex-minister and MLA Aditya Thackeray plus other senior party leaders, with thousands of people expected to join from Mumbai and other cities.

Incidentally, the Sena (UBT) move comes a day after Chief Minister Eknath Shinde announced a Mumbai Police's Special Investigation Team (SIT) probe into an alleged fraud of Rs 12,000-crore in the BMC spendings during the MVA tenure.

The alleged scam was flagged off after a special audit report submitted to the state government by the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) in March.

Uddhav Thackeray said that like the monsoons, even the elections to the civic bodies are getting delayed and now the BMC is squandering public monies, a purported Rs 650-crore has already been spent - from its deposits of Rs 92,000-crore on different grounds.

He said that they would expose the ongoing corruption in the BMC and said that something like the police SIT is unprecedented in the city's history, and if the MVA allies Congress-Nationalist Congress Party want to participate, they would be welcomed.

Referring to his party's demand to the UNO for declaring June 20 as 'World Traitors Day', Thackeray pointed out that the government is trying to confuse the people with the police SIT to probe the BMC's financial scams in road and other projects.

Thackeray questioned why Shinde and his team kept rushing to New Delhi so many times and wondered whether they were getting notices from the central probe agencies.

Earlier this morning, Thackeray held a preparatory meeting of former municipal corporators or councillors at the party headquarters for the much-anticipated polls to the BMC and other major civic bodies.