Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s additional private secretary C M Raveendran on Monday failed to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in connection with the alleged kickbacks involving the state government’s housing scheme — Life Mission project, people privy to the developments said.
According to the people quoted above, Raveendran in a mail to the central agency stated his engagement with the ongoing assembly session and promised to appear before it “once he turns free”.
A week after the arrest of CM’s principal secretary M Sivasankar, who is in judicial custody now, the ED had asked him to appear in its Kochi office at 10 am on Monday. Later in the day, Raveendran was seen in the legislative assembly.
Two days back an online site had carried details of a private chat between Raveendran and main accused in two cases, gold smuggling and Life Mission, Swapna Suresh. Though the HT could not independently verify the authenticity of chat between the two it allegedly contained “salacious comments”. The ED had reportedly retrieved call data and other details from two destroyed mobile phones of Swapna Suresh and Sivasankar.
The ED case pertains to the ₹18.50 crore accepted — after the 2018 floods in the state— from an international aid agency Red Crescent by a group of people to build houses for flood- affected people in Vadakancherry in Thrissur district. The contract to build flats was later given to Unitach Builders and middlemen. According to the people in the know of the matter, officials and some employees of the UAE consulate in the state capital allegedly received ₹4 crore as commission. Besides this, grant was accepted without permission of the Union government. Another case was registered against the accused for violating the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act.
Alleged kickbacks in Life Mission project surfaced when central agencies were probing the gold smuggling case in which 30 kg of smuggled gold was seized from the UAE consulate in the state capital in June 2020. When the lockers of main accused Swapna Suresh were opened in October 2020, the investigating agencies found ₹1 crore cash and 2 kg gold.
Later, she reportedly told them that currency was the commission received for clinching a deal with the international aid agency Red Crescent. She alleged that Sivasankar asked her to keep his commission in her locker. However, Sivasankar, who claimed that he was innocent, said he was implicated in the case by gold smugglers. Earlier, Swapna had raised serious allegations against both, Raveendran and Sivasankar, saying both were “party to all deals” and that later they put whole “blame on her to get out of these cases”.