THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) is unlikely to follow up on the preliminary inquiry that it conducted in 2007 against Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar following the suicide of a Malaysian engineer involved in a road-widening project in Keralam, as it has not found any discrepancies in the earlier probe.
Sources said the preliminary inquiry against Gyanesh, the then secretary of public works department, was found to be in line with existing rules and Vigilance protocols. Gyanesh was given a clean chit following the 2007 probe.
The UDF government had earlier this month ordered a relook into the 2007 inquiry after a Congress leader filed a complaint alleging that past investigations were compromised or abruptly stopped due to external pressure. The move came amid protests by Opposition parties demanding the resignation of the CEC over the controversies regarding the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
Lee See Been, who served as chief project manager for PATI-BEL, an Indo-Malaysian consortium involved in upgrading the MC Road under the Kerala State Transport Project (KSTP), ended his life in Kuala Lumpur in 2006 allegedly after his bid to get bills cleared was stonewalled by government officials. Gyanesh’s name was mentioned in one of Lee’s suicide notes, which also alleged systemic corruption that plagued the project’s implementation.
In the wake of the government’s order, the VACB decided to scrutinise the preliminary inquiry to assess whether any procedural errors had occurred while conducting the probe.
Sources said the inquiry did not reveal any lacunae and “it appears there is no scope for any further Vigilance action”. They said the complainant did not produce any fresh piece of evidence against Gyanesh to compel the agency to revisit its earlier decision of giving a clean-chit to the officer.
‘Nothing of note came up during scrutiny of files’
“The petition has been entered into the file. That’s all. So far nothing of note came up during the scrutiny of the case files,” said a Vigilance source.
During the exercise, the VACB found that two other preliminary inquiries were conducted against Gyanesh during the period, but none of them could make out a case against him, sources said. One case was in connection with overpaying a contractor, while another was in connection with the construction of a bridge. No angle that warranted a Vigilance look surfaced during the inquiries, sources added.
Meanwhile, the state government might ask the crime branch or constitute a special team to probe all angles other than corruption surrounding Lee’s death. Sources told TNIE that the move holds significance as the probe could bring to fore the suicide note that had pushed Gyanesh into the eye of the storm. Shortly after Lee’s death in 2006, state police had attempted to get a copy of the suicide note from Malaysia, but the move did not bear fruit.
