MUMBAI: Maharashtra Chief Minister Uddhav Thackeray will receive Prime Minister Modi at Pune airport ahead of the Director General’s conference on Friday.
This will their first meeting after Thackeray quit the NDA front under BJP and joined hands with the NCP and the Congress to form Maharashtra Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government in the state.
“CM Thackeray shall receive PM Modi at Pune airport,” said a senior officer from the protocol department of the state government.
“However, we don’t know whether he will then accompany the PM to Raj Bhavan or whether they have any meeting scheduled during the day,” the officer added.
PM Modi had congratulated Thackeray after he took the oath of office and secrecy at Shivaji Park last week, while Thackeray too had said that he will soon go to Delhi to meet his “elder brother” apparently mocking Modi’s mention of Thackeray as “younger brother” during public rallies in Maharashtra.
Thackeray would greet Modi on the backdrop of his Cabinet overturning several of previous Devendra Fadnavis government’s decisions including revoking state guarantee granted to some of the sugar mills owned by BJP leaders and scrapping stamp duty waiver for an RSS-linked institute.
Thackeray government had revoked state guarantee given to Vaidyanath Cooperative Sugar Mill controlled by Pankaja Munde, Bhima factory run by Dhananjay Mandlik, Warna factory controlled by Vinay Kore and Shiromani factory managed by Kalyan Kale.
Collectively the guarantee is to the tune of Rs 310 crore granted. It was given for securing loans from the National Cooperative Development Corporation. It was approved during the last month of Devendra Fadnavis government in the office.
While scrapping them, the government said that they were given under certain conditions, including that there should be no NPAs and there must be a positive net worth and were revoked since the units had not met conditions.
A total of 34 decisions of Fadnavis government were reviewed by Thackeray during a cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
After the review, a decision was taken to revoke stamp duty waiver given to Nagpur-based Research for Resurgence Foundation.
The institute is founded by Bharatiya Shikshan Mandal – an educational trust affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS). The duty waiver was to the tune of 1.5 crores.
Meanwhile, the PMO is said to have taken seriously complains regarding misappropriation of funds in the work of offshore Shivaji Memorial and has asked the Maharashtra CM to file a report about it.
An RTI activist had lodged a complaint with the PMO about alleged corruption in the project and the PMO had sent the letter to the CMO on November 29, sources have said.