THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Within hours of M Sivasankar’s memoirs titled ‘Aswathamavu verum oru Aana’ (Aswathama Is Only an Elephant) hitting stands, Swapna Suresh, key accused in the gold smuggling through diplomatic channel case, revealed that the senior bureaucrat was one among those who had exploited and manipulated her.
Swapna, while speaking to a news channel, threw enough hints that Sivasankar, who is currently principal secretary (Sports and Youth Welfare), was aware of the ‘hanky-panky activities’ in the UAE consulate and had even checked the status of the diplomatic baggage which had been stopped by customs on July 1, 2020.
“When I said something, he couldn’t refuse. He checked and conveyed to us that the delay in clearing the baggage was owing to the additional examination of cargo from China because of the Covid situation. It was not my personal baggage. It was a baggage addressed to the UAE consul-general to Kerala. When I came to know about the details of the cargo, I promptly informed him about that too,” Swapna said. Sivasankar, in his memoirs, claimed that he was shell shocked when he came to know of Swapna’s involvement in the gold smuggling case.
Swapna said Sivasankar had been an inseparable and integral part of her family. “It had been like that for over three years. Even my father trusted him deeply. He used to come to my house frequently and we used to have dinner together. We had also travelled together to Bengaluru and Chennai,” she said. “He was using me and I have evidence to prove that. Such a person with knowledge and experience shouldn’t have behaved like this with any woman. He came into my life for exploiting me.”
‘He arranged job for me through phone call’
Disputing another claim by Sivasankar that he had no role in engaging her as a senior official of Space Park project under the state government, Swapna said the job was arranged by Sivasankar through a phone call. “He asked me to quit the job at the UAE consulate as he knew something was wrong there. I was the sole breadwinner of my family and I needed a job.
Then he arranged this job through consultants PwC. He even promised me that he would take VRS so that we should go and settle down in the UAE,” claimed Swapna. While Sivasankar said in the book that Swapna had deceived him by gifting an iPhone on his birthday, Swapna’s version was different.
She said the phone was a gift from Unitac, the contractors of controversial LIFE Mission project at Wadakkanchery, to Sivasankar. She said he took the phone from her house when the phone he had been using got damaged.
“We celebrated Sivasankar’s birthday together and I had given him several birthday gifts,” she said. She said there were so many secrets which she didn’t want to reveal. If she wrote her memoirs, that would be a bestseller. “I don’t want to engage in mudslinging. I haven’t read his book. If I want to say anything more, I will do that after reading the book,” she said.