Author: Sayantan Chakravarty with
Lakshmi Iyer
Publications: India Today
Date: April 2, 2001
The FIR against Sonia Gandhi's private
secretary is a plain corruption issues says the CBI. But an embarrassed
Congress complains of vendetta.
Power is a word Vincent George knows
much about. He's seen it up close, smelt it all around him for 20 years;
and the aroma has usually been heady. But these days the high-profile backroom
boy of the Gandhi family-he's currently private secretary to Sonia Gandhi,
the Congress president is sensing power of a different kind. It comes from
the corridors of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and it is decidedly
acrid.
Things haven't drifted George's
way over the past one year. In early 2000 he had expected a nomination
to the Rajya Sabha. A "casual" CBI probe into his affairs-it began on January
22, 2000, as an offshoot of the investigation of infamous Enforcement Directorate
(ED) official Ashok Aggarwal- spoilt his dreams. On March 14, 2000, the
CBI registered a "preliminary enquiry", enough to begin investigations-without
full legal powers-on any public servant, past or present.
The findings of the investigations
matured into a full-fledged fir on March 20, 2001, under the provisions
of the Prevention of Corruption Act. The timing of lodging the fir may
be questionable. The NDA Government has after all been under pressure from
the Congress to resign following the Tehelka tapes. As Congress MP Ahmed
Patel put it, "It is a piece of political vendetta." Still, it has proved
acutely embarrassing for the party president.
CASE IN CONCRETE
# Properties CBI says George owns:
# Two-and-a-half-storey bungalow
at Anand Niketan, Delhi. Worth: Rs 85 lakh.
# Entire first floor of a Defence
Colony commercial property in Delhi. Worth: Rs 9.5 lakh.
# Two shops at World Trade Centre,
Connaught Place, Delhi. Worth: Rs 19 lakh.
# Agricultural land at Neb Sarai
in Delhi. Worth: Rs 32 lakh.
# Four plots, agricultural land
in Bangalore. Worth: Rs 14 lakh.
George's star began to wane on December
23, 1999. That was the day when a CBI team caught up with Aggarwal in Saharanpur
after three weeks of hide and seek. Though deputy director of the ED, Aggarwal
allegedly doubled as George's "finance manager". He apparently "fixed"
political rivals on behalf of 10 Janpath, the residence of Sonia and the
location of George's office.
Aggarwal was then, and still is,
involved in a CBI case where he had falsely implicated a Delhi jeweller
and booked him under the now annulled Foreign Exchange Regulation Act.
The other co-accused in the case is Abhishek Verma, an NRI businessman,
who had used Aggarwal to frame the jeweller. The bureaucrat, the flamboyant
businessman and the Syrian Christian stenographer who made good were quite
a threesome in those days. The CBI spoiled the party.
When Aggarwal found himself in the
law's net, he expected George to help extricate him from the mess. George
didn't or couldn't oblige. What made George's plight worse was Verma's
sensational statement before a magistrate, admitting that he had helped
launder Rs 3 crore of George's money and sent it out of the country. The
money-apparently siphoned off from the Congress election budget of 1991-had
come to Verma from George. Matters turned murkier in February 2000 when
Verma complained that he was receiving threatening calls-eventually traced
to Dubai-asking him to retract his statements against George and Aggarwal.
Abhishek Verma (above) claims he
laundered George's money abroad and Ashok Aggarwal (below) worked on the
finances. Now they are enemies.
Following Verma's disclosure, and
the subsequent interrogation of Aggarwal, the CBI feels it has enough to
tighten the noose around George. With the leads provided by Aggarwal and
Verma, the CBI has added new dimensions to the saga. George-it has been
revealed-acquired a slew of properties in Delhi and Bangalore (see list),
received monetary "gifts" from abroad, and ended up with assets disproportionate
to known sources of income.
Sample the CBI's case. Between November
1984 and December 1990, as private secretary to Rajiv Gandhi-prime minister
and leader of the Opposition in this period-George earned Rs 3.22 lakh
by way of salary. But along with his wife's Lily's "income" the figure,
during this "check period" rose to Rs 8.84 lakh.
In this period George spent Rs 1.2
lakh, allowing him a savings potential of a maximum Rs 7.64 lakh. At the
beginning of November 1984, George had declared assets of Rs 1.56 lakh.
At the end of the check period, his assets had jumped to Rs 18.81 lakh,
a gain of Rs 17.25 lakh. This was Rs 9.61 lakh more than what he said he
saved.
After December 1990, George started
drawing a monthly salary of Rs 5,000 from the AICC. Suddenly, gift cheques
began pouring into his various bank accounts in Delhi. Between November
1991 and December 1992 he received Rs 2.36 crore in three instalments.
Another Rs 1.46 crore arrived in four instalments between March 1995 and
November 1999.
In her defence, Lily George, a one-time
nurse, has been unable to throw any light on her foreign benefactors. The
extra income generated through her firms Lillien Exports and Diana Agencies
is a mystery. There is no record of these companies ever employing a single
individual nor is there any serious documentation.
Yet the George family's loose change
is substantial. In October 2000, the CBI chanced upon a bank account in
Delhi in the name of one of George's minor children. It had a balance of
a mere Rs 35 lakh. Not bad, given George's sole fortune when he came to
Delhi was his ability to type fast.
The CBI has other sensational details
as well-the information that came unsolicited from George's chartered accountant,
Anil Thakur. It seems Zacharia P. Thomas, George's brother-in-law in the
US, owns an entire floor of the Empire State Building in New York. Other
leads that the agency will follow are on the "well wishers" of the Georges
who sent them enormous amounts from abroad.
George was quizzed at the CBI headquarters
in Delhi for nearly 20 hours over four visits in the summer of 2000. He
also used Arjun Singh, Congress MP and a fellow Sonia loyalist, to lobby
on his behalf. Arjun spoke to Brajesh Mishra, principal secretary in the
PMO.
While the fir may have been a blow
to George and Arjun, not everybody in the Congress is displeased. By virtue
of the fact that he controlled access to Sonia, George played his own little
games. Madhavrao Scindia, Pranab Mukherjee and even Ahmed Patel are reported
to have had differences with him. The man is not without ambition. In the
1990s, he got himself registered as a voter in Karnataka in the hope that
the local Congress would give him a Rajya Sabha seat.
Within the Congress there is another
school of thought that suggests George will now become a "martyr", a "victim
of the BJP in Madam's eyes". He may be "rewarded" with a Rajya Sabha nomination.
In more ways than one, the jury is out on George.
