Bengaluru: The Congress-led Karnataka government has said that it will investigate the “bitcoin scandal”, in which the Congress, while it was in the Opposition, had alleged the involvement of BJP leaders during the party’s previous term in government (2019-2023).
Karnataka Minister for Home Affairs G. Parameshwara said he will seek details of the case and take appropriate action.
“We are in government and are taking it all (cases) out… bitcoin… I am reexamining the bitcoin case… we are doing all this,” Parameshwara told reporters in Bengaluru on Wednesday.
“It has been just 15-20 days since the government was formed.”
The statement comes a day after BJP MP Prathap Simha challenged the Congress government to prove its allegations against the erstwhile Basavaraj Bommai government.
The Congress has promised to investigate allegations of scandals and misappropriation of funds, including in public works, that emerged during the tenure of the erstwhile BJP government.
The bitcoin case refers to the alleged laundering of ill-gotten money by senior government officials and top leaders of the state BJP through cryptocurrencies. The alleged scandal hit front pages soon after Basavaraj Bommai replaced B.S. Yediyurappa as chief minister in July 2021.
Bommai has in turns described the case as a “non-issue” and as a “serious” matter the government had asked the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to look into.
Former CM Basavaraj Bommai could not be reached for comment for this report.
In November 2021, All India Congress Committee General Secretary Randeep Singh Surjewala alleged that “influential politicians” were involved in the case.
The case gained traction after a Bengaluru-based hacker, Srikrishna or Sriki, was apprehended by city police in November 2020 and Rs 9 crore worth of bitcoin seized.
Sriki is accused of hacking into government portals, sourcing drugs through the dark net and paying for it through cryptocurrency. The Congress had alleged that the hacker was used by officials to launder money.
“Bitfinex (bitcoin exchange) was my first big bitcoin exchange hack; the exchange was hacked twice, and I was the first person to do so,” read his description of the 2016 hacking in his statement to the police, which was released to the media.
“Around 120,000 bitcoins, which was about $72 million at the time, were stolen from Bitfinex in August 2016,” Sriki said in his statement.
“The second instance was a simple spear-phishing attack that led to two Israeli hackers working for the army getting access to the computers of one of the employees, which gave them access to the AWS cloud account,” he added.
There were also allegations that several senior BJP leaders had illegally procured around 5,000 bitcoins to launder money.
Probing BJP government
The ruling Congress has indicated that it will reinvestigate several alleged scandals under the Bommai government, which it termed the ‘40 percent sarkar” in the run-up to the May Karnataka assembly elections, in a bid to suggest that BJP ministers took up to 40 percent in commission from contractors given public works.
Revenue Minister Krishna Byre Gowda had said Friday that the state government will review all land granted to individuals, organisations and associations by the previous BJP government to check for any irregularities.
The Congress has also said it will review the controversial hijab order, and the erstwhile BJP government’s anti-conversion and anti-cattle-slaughter laws, among others. Another promise is reviewing content of school textbooks to remove “distorted history” that was inserted by the BJP as part of its “Hindutva agenda”, according to Congress leaders.
On 22 May, senior Congress leader and cabinet minister M.B. Patil had also said all cases against the BJP government will be probed.
(Edited by Sunanda Ranjan)
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