Dharamshala: Terming the action being taken against him as a well-planned conspiracy to destroy his public image in the run up to the assembly polls , Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh today accused the Enforcement Department of concealing facts and giving out a “concocted” value of the assets seized by it , just to “sensationalise” the matter.
In a hard hitting statement through a press release here today he said , “while one expected the political opponents to distort facts to drive political mileage, it was a matter of grave concern that a responsible government agency was behaving in such a manner and spreading a canard against me.”
He further said that the centre had been using its full might to harass and destablise a duly elected government in Himachal and the ED and the CBI were being misused to probe “bogus” charges against him, even though nothing incriminating had been found so far.
He said that an officer with RSS background, (Deputy Director of Income Tax, Faridabad ), was used without jurisdiction to create false, baseless and fictitious survey reports and dossiers under instructions from the IT Department, Chandigarh, with malafide intent to help create false cases using ED and CBI.
Virbhadra counters,”The farmland in question was purchased for only Rs 1.20 crore by the company Ms Mapple , promoted by my son Vikramaditya.” Singh said that he gave Rs 90 lakh to his son from his personal account through proper banking channels and the remaining amount was paid from his personal accrued moneys. His family took friendly loans amounting to Rs 5.90 crore from V Chandersekhar and the amount had been paid back in full with interest long time back and accounted for tax appropriately.
It is on record that the said property was purchased for Rs 1.20 crore but the ED gave its value at Rs 27 crore. It turns out that an officer, whose wife is a BJP MLA from UP, was assigned the duty of assessing Maple as Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax, New Delhi, who instead of assessing the revenue made malafide conclusions that the property was worth Rs 27 crore. He was supposed to assess the incomes. Now the ED was using the baseless revenue assessment figure of Rs 27 crore to sensatonalise the matter to malign and defame him.
The chief minister states, “all this was a matter of record yet my family members were being harassed and persecuted using multiple central agencies since 2013.The extent to which these agencies were being misused could be judged from the fact that even marriages of daughters and helping son to build a legitimate career was being construed as a criminal offence and draconian laws were being made applicable in matters which were of revenue nature and non-cognizable.
“The same issue was raised by the BJP leader Arun Jaitley during the 2012 Assembly Elections to derive political gains but the people outrightly rejected his unfounded allegations and voted the Congress party to power,” added Virbhadra.
He would take appropriate legal remedies to contest all persecution and not only come out clean but also politically victorious as the people of Dev bhoomi Himachal had full faith in him.
Arvind Sharma is an award winning bi-lingual journalist with more than 20 years of experience.
He has worked with Divya Himachal, Dainik Jagran, Dainik Bhasker, Vir Partap, Ajit and PTI.
In 2010, he was conferred the Himachal Kesri journalism award. He reports on the Tibetan Government in Exile, politics, sports, tourism and other topics. He lives in Dharamshala.
