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Kerala gold smuggling: CM Vijayan’s ex-secretary’s grilling ends, no clean chit yet
Sivasankar is alleged to have assisted one of the prime accused Swapna Suresh with employment and renting home apart from other suspicions related to possible involvement in the case.
After a two-day marathon grilling, Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s former secretary M Sivasankar was allowed to go by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) but he is yet to get a clean chit in the gold smuggling case, said a senior official familiar with the probe.
Earlier, there were reports that the senior IAS officer will be made an approver in the case but the official quoted above denied it.
Though the government disowned the once powerful principal secretary and acted against him, many in the ruling CPI(M) fear that the probe will be used to embarrass the state government. The opposition parties, the Congress and the BJP, have sought CM’s resignation alleging he was aware of his secretary’s actions. BJP national president J P Nadda also took potshots at the government saying “gold is yellow everywhere but it is red in Kerala.”
On Tuesday, Sivasankar was questioned for more than 10 hours at the NIA office in Kochi. Later, he was allowed to go to his Thiruvananthapuram home. He was grilled twice by the customs and the NIA in Thiruvananthapuram and was later summoned to Kochi.
Once the face of the government, Sivasankar got embroiled in the controversy after the seizure of 30 kg gold from a consignment sent to an employee of the UAE consulate in Thiruvananthapuram on July 5. It was reported that some officials at the CM’s office had allegedly pressurized the customs to release the consignment.
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But Sivasankar reportedly told investigators that though he knew some of the accused including Swapna Suresh, he was not aware of their smuggling background. There are also reports that he was instrumental in appointing Suresh as a business development manager with the Kerala Information Technology Infrastructure Limited and helped her arrange a room in an apartment outside the state secretariat which they used for smuggling activities.
