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Kerala has suspended a senior bureaucrat from service after anti-corruption sleuths found him having accumulated assets disproportionate to his source of income. |
The southern state’s Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau (VACB) found irregularities during raids on houses of T O Sooraj, secretary of the works department, in the state capital and the port city of Kochi since Thursday.
During the preliminary probe, Sooraj could not reportedly show the source for assets worth Rs18.3mn to the VACB officials, who quizzed him for about three hours in Kochi.
His investments during the past ten years are under the VACB scanner.
Chief Minister Oommen Chandy, who made it compulsory for all ministers and officials to reveal their assets and published them on the government website every year, cleared his suspension yesterday morning.
Sooraj was the director of industries for five years when veteran Marxist leader V S Achuthanandan was the chief minister (2006-11). He also worked under other ministers before shifted to the works under Indian Union Muslim League (IUML)’s V K Ibrahim Kunju.
The IUML has distanced itself from the raids and disciplinary action saying the VACB was acting independently while Kunju said he should have been “cautious” while picking up officers.
Sooraj said he was being targeted for some other reasons and he would expose those who “pretend to be great”. He threatened to reveal whatever he knew about them, if pushed to a corner and put under a shadow while others walk free.
“I know many things (about such deals of officials). I can also gather more evidences (against them),” he told reporters here, adding that he had explained the source of wealth, including his wife and son.
He was the second top official to face suspension after Rahul R Nair, a young superintendent of police (SP), for allegedly taking a Rs1.7mn bribe to reopen a quarry shut for ecological violations.
Chandy said the government would neither victimise any officer or protect those who involved in illegal activities. “The law would take its own course. I am not in a position to tell anything more about it,” he said in Kochi.
The case is now before the VACB court in Thrissur, which authorised the raids this week. All the five squads that conducted searches on different premises of Sooraj and his family members had filed separate reports.
They reportedly include 140 seized documents such as title deeds of properties and evidence of bank transactions.
His department awards road contracts worth billions of rupees every year through e-tendering. No irregularities in any such specific case was reported by the investigators so far.
He had also faced charges of failure to act on information that he received as the district collector of Kozhikode about the 2003 Marad riots, in which eight Hindu fishermen were hacked to death in a swift attack on the beach. But no action was initiated against him by successive governments.
“There is strong evidence against him. The action against him is neither vindictive nor prejudiced,” Home Minister Ramesh Chennithala said. “Vigilance is not a caged parrot. They will go ahead with the probe against corruption”.
