Late last night, at a Bengaluru home, 22 boxes containing more than ₹ 42 crore in cash were discovered concealed beneath a bed. After income tax raids on a former woman corporator and her spouse, the money was found.
Harish Rao, the finance minister for Telangana, has now connected the seizures to funds used for the state’s elections.
The leader of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi party asserted today that the funds were obtained from contractors, gold companies, and builders under the Telangana tax and that they were a portion of the ₹ 1,500 crore that the neighbouring state had sent in to support the Congress election campaign in the state, which is headed by Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao.
“They are trying to pump money into Telangana to win the election here. They are even selling tickets. But they won’t win here,” Harish Rao alleged.
Additionally, working president of the BRS K T Rama Rao claimed that the Congress is splurging crores of rupees on Telangana in order to buy votes in the next Assembly elections.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently said, during a public meeting in Nizamabad, that Karnataka was providing money to support the BRS in Telangana and that KCR had financed the Congress elections in Karnataka. He said that it was now time for revenge.
Voting in Telangana is scheduled for November 30.
Following raids on Ashwathamma, her husband R Ambikapathy, their daughter, and Ashwathamma’s brother-in-law Pradeep at RT Nagar at midnight, the cash in ₹ 500 denominations was discovered.
The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) Contractors’ Association, whose vice president is R Ambikapathy, has accused the previous BJP government of receiving a 40% commission on public projects.
According to reports, the funds were to be transported from Bengaluru to Hyderabad via Chennai. The raids were apparently carried out over the last few days on a tip from IT officials.
It appears that Ashwathamma is the older sister of Akhand Srinivasamurthy, a former Congress MLA.
A defamation suit was launched by BJP MLA Munirathna against Ambikapathy after the latter accused him of requesting a commission.
D Kempanna, the president of the Contractors’ Association, Karnataka, while reacting on the raids, said, “He has not taken up any work for the last eight years. I got a call from my wife that Ambikapath and his relatives’ homes had been raided. He has a lot of other work also apart from being a contractor,” he said.
“I shouldn’t comment about something I don’t know about. If the amount has been found at his relatives’ house, let the law take its own course,” he added.
Regarding the forty percent commission that was being imposed on all public projects, the Karnataka State Contractors’ Association had written to both the then-prime minister and the then-chief minister.
The Karnataka government requested a judicial investigation last month into claims that the state’s former BJP-led administration demanded a “40% commission” for public projects.
The investigation panel will also determine if the projections were in line with the current schedule of prices and whether they needed to be revised in the event that costs increased.
The claim of a “40% commission” was one of the polling platforms the Congress used to attack the BJP government during the election campaign.
The BJP lost its sole stronghold in the south when the Congress swept to victory in Karnataka in May of this year, winning 137 of the state’s 244 seats.
