Bengaluru: The Congress government in Karnataka, led by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, has decided to revoke the permission given to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to investigate Deputy Chief Minister D.K. Shivakumar, who has been booked in a disproportionate assets case.
The move comes as a relief for Shivakumar, who has been under the scanner of various central agencies.
The decision was taken in the state cabinet meeting headed by Siddaramaiah in Bengaluru Thursday evening. Shivakumar was not a part of the meeting.
“(The) cabinet held that keeping in view the opinions of the old and new advocate general, bypassing and overlooking the speaker… the decision that was taken was not in accordance with the law,” H.K. Patil, Karnataka’s minister for law and Parliamentary affairs, told reporters after the cabinet briefing late Thursday.
The minister added that the earlier sanction was given orally by the then CM (B.S. Yediyurappa) but “the Speaker’s mandatory sanction was not taken”. Patil also said that the administrative approvals will come out within the next couple of days.
Shivakumar, who is reportedly also India’s richest legislator, is accused of allegedly amassing assets worth Rs 74.93 crore beyond his known sources of income during the 2013-18 period.
The CBI had registered a case against him on 30 October, 2020, after obtaining sanction from the state government on 25 September, 2019.
Meanwhile, reacting to the decision, BJP state president B.Y. Vijayendra told reporters in Bengaluru Friday that the cabinet decision was “totally illegal”.
“With regards to D.K. Shivakumar’s disproportionate assets case, the cabinet decision is totally illegal (and) against the Constitution. I request our deputy chief minister that if you have faith in the legal process, legal remedy, please don’t entertain such decisions taken by the cabinet. I request him to oppose this decision,” he said.
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Shivakumar’s long legal battle
The Deputy CM had challenged the CBI case in the courts, and in April this year, a single-judge bench of Karnataka High Court dismissed his petition but, during the course of the hearing, granted an interim stay on the investigation.
However, in October this year, a single-judge Karnataka HC bench of Justice K. Natarajan vacated the interim stay on the CBI probe and ordered the central agency to complete its investigation and submit its final report within three months. The case is expected to be heard on 29 November.
The CBI case was preceded by a series of actions by other central agencies against Shivakumar.
In 2017, the Income Tax department raided his and his close aides’ residences in Bengaluru and other places. Probe agencies later claimed that around Rs 8 crore in cash and assets were unearthed during the searches.
The raids took place when Shivakumar was reportedly hosting around 40 Congress legislators from Gujarat in a resort in Bengaluru, to prevent them from being poached by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ahead of the Rajya Sabha election of senior Congress leader Ahmed Patel.
Following the IT raids, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) initiated a probe against Shivakumar under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), and arrested him on 2 September, 2019, in Delhi after four days of interrogation.
The ED claimed to have found large sums of cash and unaccounted assets, following which it then wrote to the state government to conduct a probe under The Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.
Shivakumar spent around 50 days in Tihar jail before being released on bail on 24 October, 2019. The Congress party had reportedly termed his arrest as part of the larger conspiracy to use central agencies to target opposition party leaders.
(Edited by Richa Mishra)