Central Bureau of Investigation raided 14 locations in Karnataka, Delhi and Mumbai linked to Congress state president DK Shivakumar and his brother, Bengaluru Rural MP DK Suresh.
CBI launched the raids around 6am after the Karnataka government gave central sleuths permission to probe corruption charges against him. The raids are likely to continue on Tuesday.
The raids come nearly one year after the Congress troubleshooter secured bail in an alleged money-laundering case after spending 50 days in Tihar jail. CBI said it has filed a case against Shivakumar based on allegations of possession of Rs 75-crore disproportionate assets in his and family members’ names. It claimed to have recovered Rs 57 lakh in cash and documents during the raids.
The CBI FIR says the DKS family’s assets increased from Rs 33.9 crore in April 2013 to Rs 162.5 crore in just five years.
Shivakumar said: “I won’t get bogged down by the ruling party’s intimidating tactics.”
Congress leaders questioned the timing of the raids ahead of the November 3 bypolls to Sira and RR Nagar assembly constituencies, terming it ‘vendetta politics’ in the backdrop of Shivakumar exposing the alleged corruption in the BJP government in Karnataka in the procurement of Covid-related equipment.
The BJP described protests by the Congress over CBI raids as “ridiculous and meaningless”.
The Congress leader was arrested on September 23, 2019, by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in the money-laundering case and was lodged in Tihar jail. He was released on October 23 after the Delhi high court granted him bail.
Shivakumar, facing money-laundering and income tax-related cases, is facing charges of amassing wealth when he was energy minister in the Congress government from 2014 to 2018. ED sources said they came across alleged larges-cale irregularities during tendering of solar power plants and approving applications to set up solar rooftop panels. Transactions with private generators are under the scanner.
In 2017, income-tax officials, while searching premises owned by Shivakumar, reportedly found documents linked to his alleged involvement in money-laundering, besides Rs 7 crore in cash. They referred to the case to the ED. “As the ED has no jurisdiction to probe a graft case, the state government decided to hand over the case to the CBI,” said CBI counsel P Prasanna Kumar.
The government’s decision to give permission to the CBI to investigate was challenged by Shivakumar, but it was dismissed. But the high court had, in a ruling on September 28, said there should be no coercive action against Shivakumar.
AS Ponnanna, who served as additional advocate general during the Congress government and now a Congress spokesperson, said, “The court had clearly said, ‘Do not precipitate.’ What I understood from this is: ‘They (CBI) should not have acted.’ They should have got it vacated from the court and acted after permission from the court.”
Deputy chief minister Ashwath Narayan said the CBI, ED and IT are institutions with functional autonomy to investigate and bring to justice fraudsters. “The raid is in continuation of investigations started by the ED in 2017,” he added.
