Hyderabad, April 21: The Central Bureau of Investigation has asked the Central Vigilance Commission for permission to prosecute the IAS officer, Mr L.V. Subrahmanyam, who has been implicated in the Volkswagen scam. The CBI has written to the CVC after both the state and Centre refused to sanction prosecution of the IAS officer. Sources in the CBI said that a joint meeting of officials is likely to be held in the presence of the CVC.
Mr Subrahmanyam is now working in the finance department, but was vice-chairman and managing director of the AP Industrial Infrastructure Corporation when the Volkswagen scam took place. A CBI official said that the agency has approached the CVC “as a last resort”. The CBI DIG, Mr V.V. Lakshminarayana, confirmed that he had written to the CVC on the issue. “We are pursuing the case at the highest level,” he said.
The investigating agency says it has evidence that Mr Subrahmanyam omitted procedures of due diligence when transferring crores of rupees of public money to Volkswagen’s Indian subsidiary, Vashistha Vahan. The credentials of the Indian subsidiary were not checked properly, and the money was directly transferred to the regular accounts and no proper counter safety measures were taken while transferring the money.
The CBI had filed a chargesheet against seven persons in September 2010 for cheating and criminal conspiracy in the `11.67 crore VW scam committed in 2005. Those named in the chargesheet are Mr Helmuth Schuster, former VW executive, the company’s former India representative, Mr Ashok Kumar Jain, and four others, Mr Jagdeesh Alaga Raja, Ms Gayathri Chandravadan, Mr B.K. Chaturvedi and Mr Joseph V. George.
They have been charged for defrauding the AP government and illegally siphoning off the money deposited in Vashistha Vahan, a special purpose vehicle formed to facilitate the setting up of Volkswagen’s manufacturing base near Visakhapatnam. During the investigation, `5 crore of the `11.67 crore was recovered. The Lok Ayukta has also inquired into the scam.
–Agencies