Thiruvananthapuram : A day after Kerala Finance Minister KM Mani resigned in connection with the bar bribery case, liquor baron Biju Ramesh has trained his guns on Excise Minister K Babu.
Ramesh, who fuelled the case against Mani through his revelation that the latter took a bribe of Rs1 crore from bar owners for facilitating the renewal of bar licences, alleged that Babu had taken Rs 10 crore for not raising the bar licence fee in 2013.
He claimed that he himself had handed over Rs 1 crore to the minister. However, he said that the Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) that investigated the allegation against Mani had refused to record his statement regarding the bribe given to Babu.
Ramesh alleged that the investigating officer had prevented him from speaking against Babu on the directions of the then VACB director, Vincent M Paul, on the basis of a political decision. He said he will now pursue the case by filing a separate case.
The bar owner, who is also the working president of the Kerala Bar Hotel Association (KBHA), said that he was ready to subject himself to narco analysis to prove his charges and asked if the minister would be ready to do it for himself.
Babu responded saying that Ramesh was raising the allegation six months after the probe against him was closed because he refused to withdraw the defamation suit he filed against him. He said that Ramesh had approached him through two of his friends.
“If Ramesh had any evidence to support his allegation, he could have handed it over to the investigating officer when a quick verification was conducted. He kept silent during the course of the quick verification and after that,” he added.
He termed Ramesh’s claim that the VACB had refused to record his statement as baseless. “If that was the case, he could have spoken when he made the statement before the court under Section 164. Without doing that he is now raising baseless allegations,” he added.
Meanwhile, Poakkulath Krishna Das, one of the two names revealed by Babu at his press conference, confirmed that Ramesh had sought his help to settle the criminal and civil suits the minister filed against him.
Chief Minister Oommen Chandy has termed the allegation politically motivated. He said that Ramesh, who kept silent for more than year now, was raising baseless allegations as part of a larger conspiracy to demoralise his government. He said that the government will not succumb to such tactics.
