Hyderabad: A special Enforcement Directorate court has issued summons to Andhra Pradesh chief minister Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, YSR Congress MP Y Vijayasai Reddy, seven directors of pharma companies - Hetero, Aurobindo and Trident Life Sciences - along with scores of former officials of APIIC asking them to appear before it in connection with a case.
The ED case is an offshoot of the CBI’s quid pro quo case wherein the pharma firms were charged with bribing Jagan’s firms by way of investments in lieu of the land allotments they got when his late father Y S Rajasekhara Reddy was the CM in 2004-09 when the state was united. The case was recently transferred from Nampally metropolitan sessions judge court to ED special court which renumbered the case and issued fresh summons.
With this, all the six chargesheets filed by the ED in the quid pro quo case have now reached the ED special court which will hear all the cases along with the CBI’s 11 chargesheets filed in the same case. The CBI court, it can be recalled, was earlier designated as an ED special court to hear the cases filed under Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
The CBI case against these pharma companies was that they had entered into a criminal conspiracy with the accused to get 150 acres of land at Jadcherla SEZ in Telangana in lieu of £2.9 million investment they made in Jagan’s media house, Jagathi Publications. But, advocates representing the AP CM and the pharma firms have denied these charges and termed them as politically motivated.
Although this was a disproportionate assets case, the allegations made by the probe agencies were disproportionate, the investigators said citing the lesser value of the land the companies had got and the higher value of the investment they made. An ED appellate tribunal too found force in their argument last year and wondered why any industrialist would lose Rs 29 crore for deriving a benefit of Rs 21 crore from the state and modified an attachment order made by the authorities of ED in respect of Hetero, Aurobindo and Trident companies.
The ED made this attachment as part of its probe into Jagan’s disproportionate assets case in its pharma companies’ chargesheet. The ED filed its case basing on a CBI case that said when YSR was at the helm he gave 75 acres of land each to Hetero and Aurobindo at Jadcherla SEZ on lease. “In lieu of this benefit, the firms invested in Jagan’s companies,” the CBI said. The ED identified several properties of the pharma companies and attached assets worth £5.1 million. The companies later challenged the action before the appellate tribunal in Delhi.
