Pacheco has been involved in various controversies, and has ten criminal cases registered against him. In June 2006, Pacheco slapped a junior engineer Kapil Natekar for not attending his personal assistant's call. Pacheco was sentenced to imprisonment for six months. In June 2010, he was arrested over his alleged involvement in the suicide of his girlfriend Nadia Torrado. He was forced to resign from his ministerial post in the then
Indian National Congress-led government, but was later given a clean chit due to absence of evidence. His estranged wife Sara Pacheco accused him of
bigamy under the
Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005. Other cases against him are road rage, abusing and threatening a traffic police constable in
Margao, forgery in property deals, and extortion of from a casino in 2009. Pacheco was probed by the
Central Bureau of Investigation when the United States'
Bureau of Diplomatic Security alleged his involvement in illegal immigration of
Goan youth and a money laundering racket. ==References==