BENGALURU, NEW DELHI: Senior Congress leader D K Shivakumar was on Tuesday arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in New Delhi under the stringent Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) for alleged tax evasion and hawala transactions.Shivakumar was being grilled for the last four days in connection with an alleged money laundering case involving Rs 8.83 crore. On Tuesday night, the ED arrested him on the charges that he was not cooperating with the probe.
Earlier in the evening, Shivakumar had complained of uneasiness and nausea, but was taken to taken to the Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital in the national capital for a health check-up hours later. Sources close to the Congress leader said he has been under treatment for “low BP and high sugar” for many years.
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Even as he was undergoing a medical check-up, his supporters and angry Congress workers hit the streets in protest back home. At many places, they resorted to stone-pelting, damaging at least four state transport corporation buses. Protesters also set fire to a bus in Shivakumar’s hometown Kanakapura and pelted stones at the local BJP office. A bandh has been called in Kanakapura and Ramanagara on Wednesday.
Anticipating trouble, the city police have requisitioned 10 KSRP platoons to be deployed in sensitive areas such as South, South-East, North and North-East zones in Bengaluru.
By late on Tuesday night, the protest spread to several places across the state and senior Congress leaders threatened to intensify the agitation. Congress coalition partner JDS too backed Shivakumar and asked its workers to join the protests. BJP, however, rubbished the charge that central agencies are being used for political reasons.
Earlier in the evening, an ED official said said Shivakumar was arrested as he was not cooperating with the probe. “We had questioned him for the last four days. Initially, he was cordial, but after two days, he was not cooperating and refused to answer many key questions. Finally, we got the go-ahead for the arrest,” the official said.
Minutes after his arrest, Shivakumar tweeted, “I congratulate my BJP friends for finally being successful in their mission of arresting me. The IT and ED cases are politically motivated and I am a victim of BJP’s politics of vengeance and vendetta.’’
The ED registered a case in September 2018 against Shivakumar and four of his associates — Sachin Narayan (business associate), Sunil Kumar Sharma (owner of Sharma Transport), Anjaneya Hanumanthaiah (liaison officer at Karnataka Bhavan, New Delhi) and N Rajendran, a former state government employee, under the PMLA based on the I-T department’s chargesheet filed before a Special Court for Economic Offences in Bengaluru. The ED had issued summons to Shivakumar on August 29.
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The I-T chargesheet claimed that Rs 8.83 crore cash was seized during search and seizure operations in August 2017 at multiple locations. It accused him of using hawala network to transfer money to Congress higher-ups and for the party fund. “The ED had examined the I-T chargesheet to verify if it contained any material for the agency to take cognizance under the PMLA,” official sources told TNIE.
Sources in the ED say that the former minister has been reticent about his business transactions with Sunil Kumar Sharma. “There was no explanation regarding the Rs 6.68 crore recovered after a raid on a house in Safdarjung Enclave on August 2, 2017, which belongs to an employee of Sharma Transport ,” the ED official added.
The Enforcement Directorate is also probing DK Shivakumar’s business trip to Singapore, along with his daughter Aisshwarya in July 2017. The ED claims that Aisshwarya had dealings with Coffee Day and M/s Soul Space and tax officials had claimed that Shivakumar has transferred Rs 20 crore to Coffee Day founder V G Siddhartha, which brought the tax officials to his doorsteps.
Shivakumar has been on the scanner of I-T authorities since August 2017, when the Directorate of Income Tax (Investigation), Karnataka & Goa raided Eagleton Golf Resort in Bidadi on the outskirts of Bengaluru, where he had hosted 44 Gujarat Congress MLAs ahead of the crucial Rajya Sabha elections.
Following the raids, the I-T department had filed a case against Shivakumar (accused No. 1) and others under Sections 276C (1) (tax evasion) and 277 (false statement) of the Income Tax Act, 1961, and under Sections 193 (false evidence) and 199 (false statement in evidence) read with Section 120 B (criminal conspiracy) of the Indian Penal Code.
Shivakumar has been charged with tax evasion, indulging in hawala transactions running into crores of rupees with the help of his four associates and for destroying evidence. He had torn a piece of paper during the Eagleton resort raid, which reportedly had information on his financial transactions. The SCEO had summoned him and granted him bail in the three cases in March last year.
In June 2018, the Central Bureau of Investigation had searched the premises of the associates of Shivakumar and his brother D K Suresh in connection with an April 2017 FIR in a bank fraud case of Rs 10 lakh at Corporation Bank, Ramanagara in the post-demonetisation period. The Congress party has protested against the tax raids against Shivakumar and has called them an act of “political vendetta.”