Bangalore: Karnataka Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa has been named in the Rs 500-crore land scam. It appears as if the CM bent every rule in the book to allot land to his family members at incredibly cheap rates.
This expose has come at a time when the BJP is targeting the Congress on a range of corruption issues from the Commonwealth Games to the 2G Spectrum. Reacting to the charge, the BJP has said the Chief Minister would not resign. "CM Yeddyurappa has every right to denotify land," the party added.
Senior ministers of the Karnataka Cabinet too have been named in the scam. BJP ministers Katta S Naidu and R Ashok are also alleged to have grabbed land.
SOME OF THE CHARGES ARE:
- Yeddyurappa is accused of favouring his daughter Umadevi in setting up a BPO. She got two acres of land on the outskirts of Bangalore.
- In another case Yeddyurappa denotified land acquired by the BDA in KR Puram to favour his sons and son-in-law Sohan Kumar
- There are also allegations of the family members getting over 5 acres of land in their home town Shimoga for a hospital and 2 acres for a factory in Bangalore.
- Another 11 acres denotified in favour of his sons in March this year are now worth Rs 181 crore.
Opposition JDS today said it would raise in Parliament the alleged land scams during the B S Yeddyurappa regime, as it charged the Chief Minister with favouring his family in the allotment. JDS state unit president and Lok Sabha member H D Kumaraswamy alleged that the scams are estimated to be between Rs 5,000 crore and Rs 6,000 crore during Mr. Yeddyurappa's tenure.
JDS would seek time in Parliament to raise the issue of scams, he said, adding he will stage a dharna if the demand was not granted. "I don't mind being evicted (from Lok Sabha) also. There is no question of going back. We will take it to its logical end," the former Chief Minister said.
While BJP leaders raised the telecom and Adarsh society scams aggressively in Parliament, he wanted to know their stand and "yardstick" vis-a-vis "Karnataka land scams".
He alleged that while Mr. Yeddyurappa denotified land to favour his sons, his predecessors did it as per law and not to benefit their family.
Mr. Kumaraswamy charged that Mr. Yeddyurappa's son Raghavendra had secured a Bangalore Development Authority site by filing a false affidavit.
He released certain documents vis-a-vis denotification during his tenure and said his actions were as per law and he had not shown any favour to his family members.
On the Chief Minister's announcement that an enquiry can be conducted by a retired Supreme Court judge into land allotted for industrial projects and denotification of land for the past 10 years, he said there was no need for the probe as documents prove land scam charges during the BJP tenure.
K'taka: CM freed govt land to help family
A fresh set of documents accessed and released by the Opposition in Karnataka on Tuesday shows that Chief Minister B S Yeddyurappa freed up two more plots of government-acquired land allegedly to favour his immediate family including his two sons, a son-in-law and daughters-in-law.
In one case, on May 14, 2010,Yeddyurappa denotified 11.25 acres (now valued at approximately Rs 181 crore) acquired on February 23, 2004 by the Bangalore Development Authority (BDA) for a pittance as part of land for the creation of a yet to be built residential area known as the Arkavathy Layout.
The request for the denotification of the land was made by its owner B R Shetty, a Dubai-based Indian business tycoon, on August 18, 2008, a couple of months after Yeddyurappa became the Chief Minister of Karnataka, according to documents of the denotification process released by Opposition leaders who chose to be anonymous.
After it was denotified, a part of the land, 2.5 acres, valued at around Rs 38.15 crore in the market, was sold for Rs 3.37 crore to a firm Besto Infrastructure Bangalore Ltd. Besto is a subsidiary of Besto Ice Cream, a partner in a real estate firm, Davalagiri Developers, run by Yeddyurappa's sons Raghavendra, Vijayendra and son-in-law R N Sohan Kumar.
Incidentally, the new subsidiary was created on June 23, just a month after the denotification. The company purchased a portion of the denotified land from Shetty on August 4, 2010. According to the documents released, the directors of Besto Infrastructure are those shown as partners of Davalagiri Developers.
Yeddyurappa has been arguing that denotifications are permitted under law and that all Chief Ministers have done it. Yeddyurappa's press secretary R P Jagadish on Tuesday night said the Chief Minister would not like to react anymore to these allegations.
"The party president, Nitin Gadkari, has said that he is satisfied with the answers given by the Chief Minister, that he has done well for the development of the state. The Chief Minister has said that denotifications are legal," he said.
Yeddyurappa is also accused of "ordering" the denotification of 0.5 acre outside Bangalore in the Rachenahalli village in favour of his sons. The land had been acquired by the Bangalore Development Authority for creating a public layout. The land was bought by the sons when Yeddyurappa was the deputy chief minister and denotified when he became Chief Minister in 2008.
The land was allotted when Yeddyurappa was the deputy chief minister under H D Kumaraswamy, during the days of the JDS-BJP coalition between February 2006 and September 2007.
The land was allotted on June 2, 2007 barely 15 days after the company was incorporated. He has also acknowledged giving his daughter Umadevi two acres to set up a BPO around 55 km from Bangalore as well as allotting a residential site in the upmarket Raj Mahal Vilas extension under an MPs quota to his MP son Raghavendra.
Source: India Syndicate, The Indian Express & PTI