Last Updated on January 11, 2021 by The Health Master
HYDERABAD: A special ED court has issued summons to Andhra Pradesh chief minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, YSRCP MP Vijaysai Reddy, retired IAS officer BP Acharya and the directors of pharma companies Hetero, Aurobindo, and Trident Life Sciences Limited, asking them to appear before it on January 11.
The ED case is an offshoot of CBI’s quid pro quo case that charged the pharma companies with bribing Jagan firms in the name of investments in lieu of the land allotment they got through the state headed by his late father YSR during 2004-2009.
The case was recently transferred from Nampalli MSJ court to ED special court which has issued the fresh summons.
With this, all the six chargesheets filed by ED in the quid pro quo case 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 was earlier also designated as ED special court to hear the cases filed under the prevention of money laundering Act.
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While the CBI case against these pharma companies was that they entered into a criminal conspiracy with the accused to get 150 acres of land at Jadcherla SEZ in Telangana in lieu of the Rs 29 crore investment they made in Jagathi publications, Jagan’s media house, the advocates of the AP CM have been stoutly denying these as politically motivated allegations.
Though the investigators say that this is a disproportionate assets case, the allegations made by the probe agencies are in fact more disproportionate.
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 Enforcement Directorate (ED) in respect of pharma companies 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 agency filed its case on the basis of a CBI case that said that the AP state under the YSR government gave 75 acres of land each to Hetero and Aurobindo at Jadcherla SEZ on lease.
In lieu of this benefit, they invested in Jagan companies, the CBI said. ED had identified several properties of the pharma companies and attached assets worth Rs 51 crore.
The aggrieved companies challenged the action before the appellate tribunal. The tribunal also found fault with the action of ED officials in terming unconnected assets of the accused companies as proceeds of crime.
It allowed the plea of the aggrieved companies to defreeze the attached assets on the condition that the amount equivalent to the worth of the attached assets would be deposited with the ED.
Aurobindo, Hetero, and Trident were asked to make cash deposits that have an equal worth of their respective attachments.
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