Kakinada Seaports Limited (KPCL) Chairman Karnati Venkateswara Rao (KV Rao) told the Enforcement Directorate (ED) officials that Vikrant Reddy, son of former TTD Chairman YV Subba Reddy and YCP MP Vijayasai Reddy threatened and harassed him and snatched shares in his company. ED questioned him for over hours in the Hyderabad office on Wednesday.
He submitted evidence of the financial transactions related to the shares. During the interrogation, the ED questioned K.V. Rao about who forcibly acquired your shares in Kakinada Seaports. ‘Do you know who Vikrant Reddy and Vijayasai Reddy are? In what ways did they threaten you?’, they asked.
‘To what extent is that true? Who gave you the money that was paid to you by reducing the value of the shares? In whose name was that money transferred to your accounts?’, they asked. They also asked “Where did that money come from? When did you come to know that the documents of the Santhanam Audit Company were forged? Who directly or indirectly threatened you to write off your shares in the Seaport and Kakinada SEZ?”.
Rao replied that he was forced to write off the shares by threatening, intimidating and threatening to send his family to jail. The ED questioned who met you to write off your shares in the Seaport and SEZ.
“A few months after Jaganmohan Reddy became the CM, I received information from the state government that a special audit was being conducted on the business transactions of the Seaport with the Chennai-based Santhanam company. Later, they said that it was also an audit of another Mumbai-based company”, he said.
“I became suspicious when this was happening on a business that was running smoothly without any mistakes and paying taxes properly. However, we cooperated and provided all the files requested. The report concluded that KSPL had embezzled Rs 994 crore from the state government and they were eyeing the shares as per the scheme”, he added.
At the same time, he said that “Vijayasai Reddy called me and asked me to meet YV Subba Reddy’s son Vikrant Reddy”. When the ED officer mentioned that Vijayasai Reddy had told them during the recent interrogation that he did not know who KV Rao was, Rao replied that it was all a lie.
After Vijayasai Reddy told him, KV Rao said he went to Vikrant Reddy home, who showed the report that he had embezzled Rs 1,000 crore from the government. He threatened that the entire family would go to jail and that if that did not happen, he would hand over all the shares in KSPL to them.
“Even though I said that I had done nothing wrong, Vikrant threatened that this was CM Jagan’s order. Even though I tried to bring it to Jagan’s attention, I understood that since he was the one who had run all this, he would not listen to me”, he added. KV Rao said that he had no choice but to sign the share transfer in July 2020.
