Tamil Nadu finance minister Thangam Tennarasu was on Thursday given additional charge of the energy portfolio, while housing minister S Muthusamy was chosen for additional charge of prohibition and excise ministry. Chief minister MK Stalin made the recommendation to governor R N Ravi a day after the holder of the ministries, V Senthil Balaji, was arrested by the ED in a cash for jobs scam.
The case against 47-year-old Balaji, who is the first member of the Stalin Cabinet to be arrested by a law enforcement agency, and his aides relates to his tenure as the state transport minister in the AIADMK government during 2011-15.
After his formal arrest at around 1.30 am on Wednesday, Balaji, who is the minister for electricity, prohibition and excise, complained of chest pain and was admitted to a government hospital in Chennai.
He underwent a coronary angiogram and was advised bypass surgery at the “earliest”. TV visuals showed Balaji feeling uneasy and crying while being brought to the hospital in a stretcher. He was arrested after a long session of questioning, official sources said.
A Chennai court later sent the minister to judicial custody till June 28 after which he sought permission to be shifted to a private hospital in Chennai for further treatment and also applied for interim bail.
The court reserved its orders including on the ED’s plea for police custody of Balaji, the DMK strongman from Karur. The ED called him the “prime suspect” in the case.
The arrest followed multi-city searches by the ED on Tuesday on the premises linked to Balaji in Tamil Nadu as part of the probe into money laundering. The move by the ED came after the Supreme Court issued an order on May 16 allowing investigations in the case by the police as well as the ED.
CM Stalin, who had slammed the ED raids against Balaji on Tuesday as “intimidation politics”, met his cabinet colleague at the Tamil Nadu Government Multi Super Speciality Hospital, Omandurar Estate.
Stalin, who is the DMK President, stepped up his attack on the BJP and charged the ED officials with “enacting a drama” in the name of inquiry and accused them of “physically and mentally troubling” Balaji. “They had pressured him to the point of him suffering chest pain,” Stalin alleged in a statement.
The ED said after raiding the premises of Balaji and his associates on Tuesday, it issued him a summons to appear before it for questioning but he allegedly “refused to sign and receive” them. It claimed Balaji “shouted and yelled” at the agency officials present at his house and the agency then attempted to record his statement there in the presence of two witnesses.
The agency charged the minister of being “completely non-cooperative” during the proceedings and hence he was arrested around 1:30 am. It said the arrest was executed in the presence of two independent witnesses as the minister “refused” to sign the arrest memo. If not arrested, Balaji could have “tampered and destroyed” the evidence, the agency said.
“Bank statement analysis of key accused revealed that there have been cash deposits of Rs 1.34 crore in the bank accounts of prime suspect V Senthil Balaji and Rs 29.55 lakh in his wife S Meghala’s account. These cash deposits are huge compared to their incomes disclosed in ITRs (income tax returns),” the ED alleged. It informed the court that “the statements given by some accused/victims and witnesses clearly point out the offence of money laundering”.
There was neither justification nor evidence to show that the source of huge cash deposits is from his genuine income,” the ED said. The allegations state that candidates who paid the money neither got appointment orders nor their money back, as promised by Balaji and the three others.
The ED filed a case of money laundering in 2021 to probe these allegations and its complaint is based on three Tamil Nadu Police FIRs filed during 2018
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