Thiruvananthapuram A long-dormant scandal involving leading players in the politically stormy UAE consulate diplomatic baggage gold smuggling case seems to have shrugged off its inertia and stormed back to bedevil the Left Democratic Front (LDF) government after a lull of nearly three years.
The Enforcement Directorate’s (ED) arrest of M. Sivasankar, former Principal Secretary to Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, on LIFE Mission “kickback”-related money laundering charges has gifted the Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) an opening to resurrect the past accusations against the previous Pinarayi Vijayan government. It has also armed the Opposition parties to assail the ruling front ahead of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Kasargode-Thiruvananthapuram roadshow led by party’s State secretary M.V. Govindan beginning February 20.
Leader of the Opposition V. D. Satheesan and Bharatiya Janata Party State president K. Surendran separately suggested that Mr. Sivasankar’s arrest was just the tip of the iceberg and that more skeletons would spill out of the government’s cupboard.
It seems not lost on the Opposition parties that Swapna Suresh, a former UAE consulate official “involved” in the gold case and an accused in the ED’s LIFE Mission money laundering case, had attempted to implicate Mr. Vijayan and his family in the corruption scandal soon after the news of Mr. Sivasankar’s arrest hit the headlines on Wednesday.
The Congress asked Mr. Vijayan to come clean on the charge, while BJP demanded his resignation. Nevertheless, the LDF appears confident that it had defeated the recriminatory campaign in the 2021 Assembly elections to assume power and would do so again.
Notably, Communist Party of India (CPI) State secretary Kanam Rajendran downplayed the likelihood that the arrest would cast the administration in poor light or have any lasting political consequences.
The ED’s money-laundering case against Mr. Sivasankar and others has its provenance in a Central Bureau of Investigation probe prompted by Congress leader Anil Akkara’s complaint in 2020.
Later, in a Supreme Court filing, the CBI claimed it had evidence that a cabal of top government officials and former UAE consulate employees, some of them accused in the gold smuggling case, had conspired to siphon off an estimated Rs 4.5 crore as commission from a Rs 20-crore UAE Red Crescent largesse to the LIFE Mission to construct 140 modern apartments for the flood-displaced needy families in Thrissur.
Subsequently, the government withdrew the general consent to the CBI to investigate cases within Kerala’s territorial jurisdiction without the administration’s approval, finding a common cause with several other non-BJP-ruled States.
