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INVESTIGATION: VINCENT GEORGE
George Cross
The FIR against Sonia Gandhi's private secretary
is a plain corruption issue says the CBI. But an embarrassed Congress
complains of vendetta.
By Sayantan Chakravarty
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| TROUBLE COMES HOME: His Anand Niketan house (below)
has George in a major fix |
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.
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CASE IN CONCRETE
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# 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.
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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.
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| 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.
-with Lakshmi Iyer
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