AP: Excise staff claim to be booze Samaritans

HYDERABAD: The Liquor Syndicate is the elephant in the room but important political figures and the excise bureaucracy in the state continued to insist it isn't visible to them. The man in the centre of the storm, minister Botcha Satyanarayana on Friday acknowledged members of his family are engaged in the trade. But he hastened to say there was nothing illegal in owning a liquor shop.Adding to the smokescreen, excise staff on Friday claimed that the practice of selling above the maximum retail price (MRP) was not the doing of the Syndicate but a tactic they encouraged to boost the state's revenues. In the face of the AntiCorruption Bureau (ACB) raids on mamooltaking personnel, excise and prohibition department staff hastily launched a 'joint action committee' on Friday and argued that the elephant in the room is an optical illusion.The committee's cochairman B Krishna Murthy said excise staff 'deliberately' allowed liquor merchants to sell over and above the MRP as it would help the state get more revenue and not for any 'consideration'. "We are given targets and oral instructions," he complained. "We only followed them. But we are being portrayed as greedy."He added, "From Monday we will follow rules. We will not allow any merchant to sell liquor at more than MRP even if it means less revenue to the government."This parsing is of a piece with the testimony of excise staffers caught taking bribes by ACB personnel in the last fortnight. Two of them took the blame upon themselves and absolved their superiors of any participating in the mamools.Satyanarayana was at pains to parse his relatives' involvement in the liquor trade. The minister, who is also the PCC chief, said he had never kept it secret that members of his family own liquor outlets in Vizianagaram. He denied that any of them were up to any shady business. He dared his detractors to prove his defence as a lie. "Let them prove that I accepted money from any liquor syndicate. I am being accused of owning 1001,000 shops Vizianagaram district. That is just not true. I am ready to hand them over to any one who proves that they are mine."