Congressman Kripa Shankar Singh may find it hard to delink himself from Koda
Eight savings bank accounts of his family members and close associates are under the scanner. Three of these accounts show cash deposits and transfers of nearly Rs 65 crore in two years by Kripa Shankar’s wife Maltidevi Singh and son Narendra Mohan Singh, neither of whom has known sources of income. The timeline is crucial. One, it covers the period when Kripa Shankar was All-India Congress Committee (AICC) observer for Jharkhand, exactly when Koda, an independent MLA then, was sworn in CM with Congress support. Two, Narendra Mohan married Ankita, daughter of Jharkhand politician Kamlesh Singh, in April ’08. Kamlesh Singh was water resources minister in the Koda government and is a key accused in the scam.
Both Koda and Kamlesh Singh were arrested in November last year; the Jharkhand vigilance bureau filed preliminary chargesheets last month against them for holding assets disproportionate to known sources of income. Kamlesh Singh’s assets were estimated at nearly 130 per cent more than his sources of income. However, a considerable sum of scam money may have been diverted through his daughter, son-in-law and the latter’s father, Kripa Shankar. It’s a trail agencies are now unravelling. The Koda diary, incidentally, mentions a “Kripashankar a/c” with several entries against it. Kripa Shankar has denied it was him, but investigators have placed him and his family under scrutiny.
Documents available with Outlook show the following:
All this could well be the tip of the iceberg, say investigators who do not rule out the possibility of other benami transactions and investments that are more difficult to unravel. The modus operandi of the family seems to have been to use two of the bank accounts for cash and other deposits, which were then transferred into other accounts for investments into real estate, commodities markets and the like. The role of the bank too has come under scrutiny.
Roughly over the same period, Kripa Shankar—who arrived in Mumbai in the ’70s as a potato/onion vendor—was MoS for home in the Vilasrao Deshmukh government. Besides being the Congress’s city unit president, he’s now the party MLA from Kalina suburb.
The timeline contains another curious fact: Kripa Shankar appears to have acquired a second PAN card in complete violation of law. His election affidavit 2009 mentions number CFYPS989P as his PAN, but in the affidavit he filed in September 2004 for the assembly election, he gives his PAN as AVAPS1485L. Possessing two PAN cards cannot possibly be an oversight, says an investigator. Was one acquired to conceal transactions in the other, transactions that take the trail back to Koda, Kamlesh Singh and others in the scam?
Kripa Shankar says he has returned one of the cards. He also denies he has had anything to do with Koda and his associates, and insists his relationship with Kamlesh Singh is purely at a family level. When contacted by Outlook, Kripa Shankar Singh had this to say in response: “There in no truth in these allegations. It is all part of a political conspiracy hatched by my political rivals.”