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Gold, designer necklace worth ₹24 lakh seized from ex-BJD MLA’s house: Official
Vigilance officials said following allegations of possession of disproportionate assets by Panigrahy, a secret verification was conducted
More than four months after he was released from jail in Tata Motors job fraud case, Gopalpur MLA and former Biju Janata Dal (BJD) minister Pradeep Kumar Panigrahy is facing heat again from the state agencies. Odisha vigilance officials on Monday said they seized around 1440 grams of gold and a designer necklace worth ₹24.25 lakh from his house.
“During the course of searches, 1440 gm of gold and a Sabyasachi Mukherjee brand designer necklace worth ₹24.25 lakh were found in the house of Pradeep Kumar Panigrahy. Steps are being taken for their attachment. The bank accounts of Panigrahy and his family members would be blocked,” said a senior official of the vigilance department.
On Sunday, Odisha vigilance officials carried out searches at several premises of Panigrahy over allegations of him possessing assets worth ₹5.05 crore which was disproportionate to his known sources of income.
Vigilance officials said following allegations of possession of disproportionate assets by Panigrahy, a secret verification was conducted which revealed that the former BJD minister amassed disproportionate assets between May 2009 and November 2020. The vigilance department registered a case against Panigrahy on October 4 in this regard.
The 56-year-old MLA, once considered to be the blue-eyed-boy of chief minister Naveen Patnaik, was arrested in December last year by the Odisha Crime Investigation Department (CID) over allegations of having collected money from youths in Ganjam district on behalf of his prospective son-in-law Akash Pathak, son of former IFS officer Abhay Pathak, with the false promise of providing jobs in Tata Motors.
He was then slapped with six more cases in different police stations and continued to be in jail till the Orissa High Court in June granted him bail. However, Akash Pathak continues to be in jail as he is yet to get bail in a case of cheating lodged by the CID. Pathak’s father and former Indian Forest Service officer Abhay Pathak was released from jail in Bhubaneswar in July this year.
Till last December, Panigrahy was considered the first among equals in the regional party and one of the very few with direct access to chief minister Naveen Patnaik. In 2004, Patnaik asked him to oversee his assembly constituency Hinjili in Ganjam district for nearly a decade. He was then given a BJD ticket in 2009 from the seaside Gopalpur constituency from where he won on a trot three times.
In 2014, Patnaik made him minister of three departments, including rural development, higher education and science and technology. He was dropped from the cabinet in 2017 but was still seen as powerful. He was appointed BJD’s Ganjam district president in 2015 despite the district having three senior cabinet ministers. In 2019, he was made responsible for 15 assembly constituencies of the undivided Ganjam district in recognition of his organisational skills.
His troubles began soon after the 2019 polls when he was blamed for the party’s defeat in three of the 15 constituencies. He retained his own seat Gopalpur by a slim margin of 2,600 votes, the lowest margin in Ganjam district. There were allegations that he had sabotaged the BJD’s prospects in these constituencies. His access to the chief minister ended soon after.
Last year, he ran out of favour when he wrote several letters to the chief minister demanding the Odisha government to bring back migrant workers from Gujarat during the Covid-19 lockdown. He then complained that the state government was ignoring local MLAs in the fight against Covid-19.
