It’s time the Bharatiya Janata Party’s ministers Arun Jaitley and Nirmala Sitharaman realise they are not the Opposition anymore. Their outrage over the Aam Aadmi Party’s alleged misdemeanours is beginning to sound frivolous and is laughable. For over two days running, Finance and Corporate Affairs Minister Jaitley and Commerce and Trade Minister Sitharaman have been frothing and fuming over election rival Arvind Kejriwal and AAP’s alleged fund-sourcing sins. Ever since AVAM, a breakaway group of AAP, revealed that the party had received Rs 2 crore in April from companies that have fictitious names and addresses, the BJP has gone on a moral offensive, but not the investigation route.
The reason is more straightforward rather than principled: after all, what have the two ministers done to check the antecedents of these bogus companies over the last eight months? As corporate affairs minister, Jaitley is solely in charge of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office, “a multi-disciplinary organisation to investigate corporate frauds”, as the ministry website reveals. The office was set up by the government in 2003 “in the backdrop of major failure of non-banking financial institutions, phenomenon of vanishing companies…”
AAP’s defence
AAP leaders have been naively bleating they received the money in four Rs 50 lakh crore deposits by cheque with PAN numbers, which they duly posted on their website. While AAP has to still give a plausible explanation why its leaders did not red-flag the donation considering the bogus company names and addresses, why was the SFIO not alerted when it is designed to automatically pick up precisely such suspicious bank transactions? Or for that matter, by the Income Tax authorities, under the finance ministry, which normally scrutinises large transactions?
As for the BJP’s accusation that AAP is indulging in money-laundering and hawala operations, the agency monitoring such transactions is the Financial Intelligence Unit, which reports directly to the Economics Intelligence Council headed by the finance minister. The FIU was set up in November 2004 “as the central national agency responsible for receiving, processing, analysing and disseminating information relating to suspect financial transactions”. It is also responsible “for coordinating and strengthening efforts of national and international intelligence, investigation and enforcement agencies in pursuing the global efforts against money laundering and related crimes”, says its website.
Under the radar
Why didn’t the banks in which the Rs 2 crore “suspicious transactions” were made, as the BJP leaders have screamed from the rooftops, alert the fraud monitoring agencies? There is a detailed and exacting set-up to pick up such frauds by banks and to report to these agencies. Is this mechanism deliberately kept ineffective to ensure that other bigger transactions slide under the radar?
Similarly, Sitharaman has been taunting AAP with her Five-Questions-a-Day attack at her daily press briefing , with barbs that have ranged from AAP’s alleged Naxalite links to VAT raids, to Kejriwal’s relationships with private power companies to using foreign volunteers from Dubai and Bangladesh, to even accusations that he insults constitutional bodies and women. All this may sound rotten in Sitharaman’s worldview but what stopped her government from investigating these allegations the last eight months, especially in election season?
Unfortunately for Jaitley and Sitharaman, they are yet to snap out of the conspiracy-theory mindset of the last four years of the United Progressive Alliance government’s misrule, when they were on a roll whipping up multi-billion dollar scams and corruption scandals – even when their party was complicit in many rackets. If they screamed coal scam, what then of the Vajpayee-led government that did not take the auction route in giving coal licenses despite its predecessor’s recommendation? In the 2G spectrum scam, the Rs 1.76 lakh crore loss was notional and not actual. The BJP blamed the UPA government for the policy, though it was was continued from them.
With a listless Congress-led UPA government, these charges could stick. But to continue to beat political opponents with conspiracies and moralism, attacking their characters rather than bothering with anything serious like an investigation is a sham.
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The reason is more straightforward rather than principled: after all, what have the two ministers done to check the antecedents of these bogus companies over the last eight months? As corporate affairs minister, Jaitley is solely in charge of the Serious Fraud Investigation Office, “a multi-disciplinary organisation to investigate corporate frauds”, as the ministry website reveals. The office was set up by the government in 2003 “in the backdrop of major failure of non-banking financial institutions, phenomenon of vanishing companies…”
AAP’s defence
AAP leaders have been naively bleating they received the money in four Rs 50 lakh crore deposits by cheque with PAN numbers, which they duly posted on their website. While AAP has to still give a plausible explanation why its leaders did not red-flag the donation considering the bogus company names and addresses, why was the SFIO not alerted when it is designed to automatically pick up precisely such suspicious bank transactions? Or for that matter, by the Income Tax authorities, under the finance ministry, which normally scrutinises large transactions?
As for the BJP’s accusation that AAP is indulging in money-laundering and hawala operations, the agency monitoring such transactions is the Financial Intelligence Unit, which reports directly to the Economics Intelligence Council headed by the finance minister. The FIU was set up in November 2004 “as the central national agency responsible for receiving, processing, analysing and disseminating information relating to suspect financial transactions”. It is also responsible “for coordinating and strengthening efforts of national and international intelligence, investigation and enforcement agencies in pursuing the global efforts against money laundering and related crimes”, says its website.
Under the radar
Why didn’t the banks in which the Rs 2 crore “suspicious transactions” were made, as the BJP leaders have screamed from the rooftops, alert the fraud monitoring agencies? There is a detailed and exacting set-up to pick up such frauds by banks and to report to these agencies. Is this mechanism deliberately kept ineffective to ensure that other bigger transactions slide under the radar?
Similarly, Sitharaman has been taunting AAP with her Five-Questions-a-Day attack at her daily press briefing , with barbs that have ranged from AAP’s alleged Naxalite links to VAT raids, to Kejriwal’s relationships with private power companies to using foreign volunteers from Dubai and Bangladesh, to even accusations that he insults constitutional bodies and women. All this may sound rotten in Sitharaman’s worldview but what stopped her government from investigating these allegations the last eight months, especially in election season?
Unfortunately for Jaitley and Sitharaman, they are yet to snap out of the conspiracy-theory mindset of the last four years of the United Progressive Alliance government’s misrule, when they were on a roll whipping up multi-billion dollar scams and corruption scandals – even when their party was complicit in many rackets. If they screamed coal scam, what then of the Vajpayee-led government that did not take the auction route in giving coal licenses despite its predecessor’s recommendation? In the 2G spectrum scam, the Rs 1.76 lakh crore loss was notional and not actual. The BJP blamed the UPA government for the policy, though it was was continued from them.
With a listless Congress-led UPA government, these charges could stick. But to continue to beat political opponents with conspiracies and moralism, attacking their characters rather than bothering with anything serious like an investigation is a sham.
