A Special CBI court on Monday, 30 May, extended the custody of S Bhaskararaman, the Chartered Accountant (CA) of Congress MP Karti Chidambaram, till 1 June, in connection with the Chinese visa scam case.
Bhaskararaman was placed under arrest by the CBI on 17 May. Karti was also interrogated by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for three days.
According to the CBI's FIR, a Mansa-based (Punjab) private firm, Talwandi Sabo Power Limited, took help of a middleman and allegedly paid Rs 50 lakh to get the visa issued for Chinese nationals which would help it in completing a project before the deadline.
CBI's Statement
"The Mansa-based private firm was in the process of establishing a 1,980-MW thermal power plant and establishing of plant was outsourced to a Chinese company. The project was running behind its schedule," said the CBI official.
"In order to avoid penal actions for the delay, the said private company was trying to bring more and more Chinese persons, professionals for their site at district Mansa (Punjab) and needed project visas over and above the ceiling imposed by the Ministry of Home Affairs," the official added.
The official stated that for the said purpose, the representative of the private company approached a person based at Chennai through his close associate and thereafter they devised a back-door way to defeat the purpose of ceiling (maximum of project visas permissible to the company's plant) by granting permission to re-use 263 project visas allotted to the said Chinese company's officials.
In pursuance of the same, the said representative of Mansa-based private company submitted a letter to the Ministry of Home Affairs seeking approval to re-use the project visas allotted to this company, which was approved within a month and permission was issued to the company.
"A bribe of Rs 50 lakh was allegedly demanded by said private person based at Chennai through his close associate which was paid by the said Mansa-based private company. The payment of said bribe was routed from Mansa-based private company to the said private person of Chennai and his close associate through a Mumbai-based company as payment of false invoice raised for consultancy and out of pocket expenses for Chinese visas related works whereas the private company based at Mumbai was never in any kind of work relating to visas. Rather it was in an entirely different business of industrial knives," said the CBI official.
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