CM vs party chief: Power scam has a new twist

“It is not the policy of this government to stop probing any corruption allegation,” VS said, adding that he was going to “examine” this issue, and knew nothing about it. This was even as Pinarayi’s lieutenant and Home Minister, Kodiyeri Balakrishnan maintained that the state government was not in favour of a CBI probe since the state vigilance department had investigated it earlier, and also since “even the CBI itself felt so”.

But CBI sources say that for the last five months, the Kochi unit of the CBI had been awaiting the nod from New Delhi to begin investigations, which never came. The High Court was unaware of this and meanwhile disposed of a PIL seeking contempt proceedings against the CBI for not beginning the probe, observing that this was already on.

Finally, CBI’s Director Vijay Shanker and its Kochi SP, T Vikram, filed a review petition before the court seeking to correct the court’s observation and saying that the CBI was not looking into this case. Their affidavit said the state vigilance department was still probing it, and the CBI, anyway, cannot begin a probe because the mandatory notification (under the Delhi Special Police Establishment Act) had not been made by the government to enable it to take over the case.

The last Congress-led state government had asked the CBI to probe the scam in March this year, a couple of months before demitting office, after the state vigilance department hauled up eight government servants for the scam and touched no politician in the FIR that it filed in the case.

The Oommen Chandy government promptly removed the vigilance director, Upendra Verma, from his job, since he had not consulted the government before filing the FIR in the sensitive case. Soon, the government decided to hand the case to the CBI, but the move remained stalled after the Left government succeeded it.

In 1996, Pinarayi Vijayan, who was the state electricity minister in the E K Nayanar government, had got the Kerala State Electricity Board to award a renovation and maintenance contract for three hydel projects — at Pallivasal, Sengulam and Panniyar — to a Canadian company, SNC Lavalin. Vijayan had himself led the state delegation to Canada to hammer out the deal, worth Rs 374.5 crore.

In return for the consideration, Lavalin signed a contract to provide a grant of Rs 98 crore to set up a cancer hospital near then chief minister Nayanar’s constituency. An amount of Rs 8.98 crore paid by Lavalin by end-1998 has been accounted for. There’s no sign of the remaining Rs 89 crore, if that was indeed paid up. And no explanation why the contract was not enforced and Lavalin made to pay up.

That was not all. The report of the CAG which looked into this had said that the entire expenditure of Rs. 374.5 crore incurred on the project between 1997 and 2001 “was rendered wasteful,” and didn’t show any improvement in power generation. On the contrary, the power stations at these three places did not even achieve the pre-renovation power generation levels after the renovation and modernization was completed in 2001, it said.