THE STATES

Badals in the dock

PRAVEEN SWAMI

Punjab Vigilance Bureau files a charge-sheet alleging that former Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal and his family amassed assets vastly disproportionate to their known sources of income when Badal was in power.

LIKE every other corruption scandal to come out of Punjab in recent years, there is something surreal about the numbers involved in this one.

Shiromani Akali Dal chief and former Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal and his son Sukhbir Singh Badal (left) in Chandigarh.

On November 22, the Punjab Vigilance Bureau filed a charge-sheet alleging that former Chief Minister Prakash Singh Badal, his wife Surinder Kaur Badal and son Sukhbir Singh Badal had piled up assets worth Rs.4,326 crores during the five years the Shiromani Akali Dal-Bharatiya Janata Party (SAD-BJP) alliance was in power in the State. That sum is more than 10 times the State's outlay for education in the Eighth Plan, which is Rs.412.78 crores; well over half its projected plan expenditure of Rs.2,882 crores; and a staggering 8 per cent of India's entire projected defence expenditure for 2003-04. The Badal family says it is facing an absurd political vendetta, not a legal case; Prakash Singh Badal has already filed a defamation case against Chief Minister Amarinder Singh, and Sukhbir Badal plans to move the court against the Vigilance Bureau.

Amarinder Singh has gone on record to say that the charge-sheet will be the first in a sequence dealing with separate categories of Badal family assets. The charge-sheet deals with Rs.501 crores of assets, including the upmarket Orbit Resorts in Gurgaon in Haryana, on the outskirts of New Delhi, and a sprawling farmhouse in Balasar, also in Haryana. According to the charge-sheet, a little over Rs.79 crores of these assets were in excess of those the Badal family could prove came from legitimate sources of income. The Vigilance Bureau is now investigating the accounts of several businesses owned by the family, notably in the transport sector. It has also said it will move the courts for a letters rogatory, a legal instrument allowing investigators to seek assistance formally on assets they believe Sukhbir Singh Badal holds in the United States, Europe and Australia.

Sukhbir Singh Badal has hit back at these allegations and has hotly denied holding any assets overseas. Several bank loans obtained to construct Orbit Resorts, he claimed on November 27, had not been taken into account while arriving at the disproportionate assets figure of Rs.79 crores. He has also pointed out that the Public Works Department (PWD), which first assessed the pieces of property dealt with in the first charge-sheet, came up with figures considerably lower than those arrived at by independent, Income Tax Department-approved authorities hired by the Vigilance Bureau. The Vigilance Bureau has responded to his fusillade by saying that the PWD was not equipped to assess the costs of expensive marble and inlay work in the property dealt with in the charge-sheet.

Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh.

If the prosecution script goes according to plan, witnesses will depose that some of these alleged assets were raised through corrupt practices. Superintendent of Police Harminder Pal Singh told investigators he had approached Prakash Singh Badal for what he described as a "good" posting in 2001. He said Badal referred him to Sukhbir Badal, now a Rajya Sabha member, who finally settled on a bribe amount of Rs.2 lakhs. Two bodyguards posted with Sukhbir Badal's maternal uncle and business associate, Kanwaljit Singh Sidhu, have given a colourful account of these activities. Whenever Sidhu visited India, Jagdish Kumar and Ishwar Singh have stated, Sukhbir Badal or his personal assistant Krishan Kumar would arrive "with bags full of currency notes". The cash was, they claimed, sometimes transferred to the car of an alleged New Delhi-based hawala dealer, Pinky Grover.

Cash, Vigilance Bureau officials allege, was ploughed into property in India and abroad, after being laundered through a welter of front companies held directly by the Badal family or their associates and relatives. Only a relatively small part of the earnings, the Vigilance Bureau says, was held in India. The rest was pumped into bank accounts and buildings in three continents using a U.S. Social Security Number obtained by Sukhbir Singh Badal as a student, officials allege. The Vigilance Bureau's assessment of the property, based on investigations carried out by Deputy Inspector-General of Police Siddharth Chattopadhyay, is, however, largely impressionistic, since no valuation has actually been carried out.

SOME elements of the alleged international trail, though, have been made public by the Vigilance Bureau. Wimpy International, a fading fast-food chain with a presence in New Delhi and Chandigarh, is charged with having played a key role. Kanwaljit Singh Sidhu, the leading figure in Wimpy International, is alleged to have run a welter of allied front companies for laundering Badal family funds. The chain, the Vigilance Bureau claims, held accounts with several banks in New Delhi and the Bank of Pakistan in New York for this specific purpose. Funds sent abroad through the hawala channel, investigators allege, were routed back into Badal-held businesses through the Wimpy chain.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

A house said to be owned by Sukhbir Singh Badal in Chandigarh.

Despite its parlous financial condition, the Vigilance Bureau says, Wimpy International made substantial investment in Orbit Resorts. Sidhu, it has claimed, had purchased shares at nine times their face value of Rs.100 from Sukhbir Badal even before the project became operational. He agreed not to sell his Rs.9-crore investment or repatriate profits or capital, a distinctly unusual but, in all fairness, a wholly legal move. What investigators now hope to nail down is just where Sidhu got the money from. Several Wimpy employees, along with Sidhu, were detained in the course of the investigation. Their interrogations and intelligence inputs, Vigilance Bureau officials say, first raised the name of the alleged New Delhi-based hawala trader.

Narottam Singh Dhillon, a long-standing friend of Sukhbir Badal, is also alleged to have played a key role in laundering funds. Although Dhillon had not declared businesses or sources of income, he managed to fund a lavish lifestyle right through Prakash Singh Badal's stewardship of Punjab. Vigilance Bureau officials say that he made over loans of Rs.53 lakhs to Sukhbir Badal, Rs.25.5 lakhs to Surinder Kaur Badal and Rs.10 lakhs to Prakash Singh Badal, apart from investing Rs.26 lakhs in transport businesses owned by the family. All these funds, the Vigilance Bureau contends, were raised by Dhillon, acting as an agent for the sale of jobs and contracts. The Vigilance Bureau says that the detailed account of Dhillon's activities rests in part on his custodial disclosures after his arrest.

Vigilance Bureau lawyers will also go into court armed with an analysis of the Badal family's income carried out by the chartered accountant S.K. Shrivastava. Prakash Singh Badal's income, Shrivastava's study claims, was Rs.86,48,968, and his total expenditure Rs.1,98,43,240 during the five-year period concerned. Part of this substantial difference, the report says, was made up by overstating agricultural income and loans. Surinder Kaur Badal's income, similarly, was found to have been Rs.2,42,18,753 during the five-year period, and her expenditure Rs.3,93,24,271. The Vigilance Bureau claims she gave no clear answers for the discrepancy. Sukhbir Singh Badal's unaccounted earnings, according to Shrivastava's analysis, were the most glaring: during the five years in question; he spent Rs.5,60,91,902 against an income of Rs.3,72,11,719.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

Orbit Resorts, a five-star hotel in Gurgaon, Haryana, identified by the Punjab Vigilance Bureau as belonging to the Badals.

How the Badal family's lawyers respond to these details is not clear; defendants in criminal trials are generally advised not to disclose their defence outside the courtroom. Sukhbir Badal's press conference, however, has made clear the outlines of the family's posture - that the valuations were inaccurate and were conducted under pressure and that key elements of the family's finances have been wilfully omitted by the Vigilance Bureau. A more fateful battle, however, may be fought outside the courtroom.

A SAD road blockade called to protest against the charge-sheet turned out to be a damp squib, a sign that Punjab voters have not yet forgotten the many allegations of corruption that finally led to Prakash Singh Badal's electoral defeat. Within the SAD, many senior leaders, including Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC) chief Gurcharan Singh Tohra, sense opportunity in the crisis and are determined not to allow Sukhbir Badal succeed his father in the party. Interestingly, Prakash Singh Badal has been advised by the SAD to seek bail, something he had previously stated in public that he would not.

Whatever happens either in the court or within the SAD, the Punjab government's line of action has blown apart the deeply entrenched culture of crony corruption in State politics.

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