Soon after the Congress party spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, on Friday, alleged that former chief minister B.S. Yeddyurappa made payouts worth Rs 1800 crore to his party's central leadership in 2009, Yeddyurappa dismissed it as a "malicious campaign" and said it would be dealt with legally.
"It is an attempt to gain political mileage in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections as the Congress party has run out of ideas and frustrated with the growing popularity of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They have realised their defeat in the elections is imminent and have resorted to planting this story in the media," charged Yeddyurappa, who claimed the diary pages (documents) cited by the Congress leaders had been proven to be forged documents.
"I will file a defamation suit against all those who are making baseless allegations," warned Yeddyurappa.
Strangely, the evidence provided by the Congress leader was no more than a photocopy of a media report and copies of the pages of a legislator's diary, which have handwritten entries of the payouts. The pages were seized from Congress Minister D.K. Shivakumar's possession during the income tax raids on his residence in 2017, when he was playing host to Congress MLAs from Gujarat. Interestingly, Shivakumar who handed the diary pages to the IT sleuths told them that he did not file a complaint before the Anti Corruption Bureau (ACB) or the Lokayukta as he could not verify the authenticity of the documents.
Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad dubbed the diary pages as "fabricated".
Meanwhile, the Central Board of Direct Taxes (CBDT) has refuted the claims made in the media report which was cited by Surjewala.
A press statement by CBDT states that a search action under Section 132 of the Income Tax Act, 1961, was carried out on D.K Shivakumar on August 2, 2017, in a group of cases.
During the raid by the Income Tax Investigation Directorate of Karnataka and Goa, a large evidence of incriminating material against Shivakumar and his company were found. The raiding party was handed a bunch of loose sheets—a copy of Karnataka Legislative Assembly, Legislator’s Diary pages of 2009, with details of numerical entries against some individual names.
Shivakumar, when confronted, stated that this was a copy of diary, written by Yeddyurappa, and the payments paid on behalf of Yeddyurappa to legislators, and received from various leaders, MLAs, ministers when they were in power.
When the IT sleuths asked him as to how he got possession of the pages, Shivakumar claimed he gets such information from the people and he could not reveal his sources. He clarified that he had no information about when the said transactions had taken place and that he did not have the original pages of the diary.
When questioned as to why he had not complained to the ACB or the Lokayukta, he said he was not sure of the authenticity of the documents or pages in his possession. But, he mentioned the signature in the diary appeared to be that of Yeddyurappa.
When the IT officers placed the seized material and the statements of Shivakumar before Yeddyurappa (on 25.11.2017), he told them he was not in the habit of writing a diary and that the loose sheets in question were not in his handwriting. He further stated that contents in the pages were false and fabricated and it was politically motivated to tarnish his image.
The Hyderabad-based Central Forensic Science Laboratory had insisted that a probe into the authenticity of the signature or the handwriting was possible only when the disputed documents are sent to them in original for document analysis.
The Income Tax Office has made every effort to procure the originals of the disputed writings. However, the details about the place and custody of the original writings and, if the original writings exist, are not available. The same loose sheets prima facie appear to be of a doubtful nature and were given by the person who was being raided for tax violations.
Diarygate in Karnataka is not new. Previously, the BJP had released the contents of a diary allegedly with notings on the payouts made to the Congress high command. The diary belonging to MLC K. Govindaraju, allegedly recovered during an IT raid, had embarrassed the Congress, which posted a recorded conversation between two senior BJP leaders Yeddyurappa and H.N. Ananth Kumar as a rebuttal. In the video, the two leaders can be heard saying they too had paid their party higher-ups, but not as much as Rs 1,000 crore (claimed in Govindaraju's diary). The duo can be heard saying they have lit a spark which will turn into fire. Let him (Siddaramaiah) go around answering to the people till the elections, laughed the leaders.
Even as the Congress Party is demanding that the new diarygate be probed by the Lokpal, the Supreme Court's stand on the issue of diaries serving as evidence for criminal prosecution is clear.
