Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Viajayan tabled in the Legislative Assembly the much awaited Justice G Sivarajan commission’s 1,076 page report. Kerala was gearing to read the risqué Solar Inquiry report and it did not disappoint in the detailing. In fact, social media was rife with television advisories not to allow children below the age of eighteen to watch news. Though the commission had examined 214 witnesses and had taken four years to complete the report (it was notified on 29-10-2013) it gave much weightage to the 21-page-epistle written by conwoman Saritha S Nair on July 19, 2013, during her sojourn in jail. Interestingly, the report, in several places makes references to her elegant look, her dress sense and her charm.
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Saritha S Nair, one of the directors of Team Solar Renewable Energy, was arrested in June 2013 for cheating people: She had promised her victims solar power, collected money from them and then disappeared. The victims alleged that she had the backing of the then chief minister Oommen Chandy’s office because she had deliberately told them that she had governmental support. One of her victims was taken to the then CM’s office. Sarita’s letter, a-bare-it-all-testament, unabashedly gives a laundry list of the then cabinet ministers and the ruling party members who sexually abused her. Chief among them was the then chief minister Oommen Chandy, who, she says, quite atrociously, “wanted her to do oral sex. She obeyed it and had oral sex with him in the Cliff House.” Reminiscent of the infamous White House peccadilloes, the Cliff House, the official residence of the chief minister, is alleged to have been the bower for their sexual dalliances. She has written that she begged him about her business proposals but he was more interested in his “sexual satisfaction”. Besides that she alleges that she paid Chandy a sum of Rs 2 crore 16 lakhs which she paid in several instalments. She alleges again in her letter that she paid Chandy one crore in Cliff House, 40 lakhs to his aide in Delhi, 50 lakhs to both Chandy and his aide Thomas Kuruvilla at the airport in Delhi and another 25 lakhs and another 1 lakh to his aide Kuruvilla again. She told the commission that she would call Chandy every morning at 7 am using the phones of his aides.
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Her company Team Solar Renewable Energy proposed to supplement the energy deficiency in the state. Saritha S Nair who went by the name Lakshmi Nair was the director and her supposed husband Biju Radhakrishnan alias Dr R B Nair, was the CEO and MD of Team Solar. He claimed that he was an IAS officer who had resigned from the post and had a doctorate in renewable energy and he was the advisor of Dr Farooq Abdulla and Chandy. The report has all the intrigues of a Jeffery Archer novel. The easy manner in which the duo gain entry into the highest echelons of power by befriending all the staff in the then chief minister’s office right from his gunman Salim Raj to his trusted personal assistant Tenny Joppan is very interesting. In her deposition to the commission she says that it was Chandy who introduced her to the Power Minister Aryadan Mohammed, 81. Mohammed was paid a graft of Rs 40 lakhs and sexually used her several times and so did K C Venugopal, MP who “had a huge sexual appetite.” Though Chandy and Mohammed initially denied having any knowledge of the duo, however they acknowledged having seen them when a video was shown to them of Saritha attending a program with them in two separate incidents.
Chandy, however, denied all the allegations and said his life is an open book. He said that if he was the type of person to have taken money or the “other” allegation then it would have come out in the open a long time ago. Ramesh Chennithala defended Chandy saying he had 50 years political life behind him and he has been chief minister of Kerala twice.
