K Kavitha conspired with AAP leaders Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia to get favours in Delhi excise policy: ED

BRS leader K Kavitha and some others “conspired” with top AAP leaders, including Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia, to get favours in the now-scrapped Delhi excise policy by paying Rs 100 crore to the political party that rules Delhi, the Enforcement Directorate alleged on Monday. Forty-six-year-old Kavitha, the MLC daughter of former Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao, was arrested by the federal agency last week from her Hyderabad home and she is in the ED custody till March 23. Probe found, the ED claimed in a statement, that Kavitha along with others “conspired with the top leaders of AAP including Arvind Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia for getting favours in the Delhi excise policy-formulation and implementation.”

“In exchange of these favours, she was involved in paying Rs 100 crore to the leaders of AAP,” the agency said.

By the acts of “corruption and conspiracy” in the formulation and implementation of Delhi excise policy 2021-22, a continuous stream of illegal funds in the form of kickback from the wholesalers was generated for the AAP, it said. It alleged “Kavitha and her associates were to recover the proceeds of crime paid in advance to AAP and to further generate profits/proceeds of crime from this entire conspiracy.”

The agency, while seeking the remand of Kavitha last week, told the special Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) court that she was “one of the kingpins, a key conspirator and beneficiary of the Delhi excise policy scam”.

Kavitha asserted earlier that she had done nothing wrong and alleged that the Centre was “using” the ED as the BJP could not gain a “backdoor entry” into Telangana.

The Aam Aadmi Party has accused the BJP was using ED and CBI as its “goons” to finish off political opponents. The agency said it has conducted searches at 245 locations across the country since the registration of a case in 2022 and has arrested 15 persons, including former Delhi deputy CM and Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Manish Sisodia, AAP leader Sanjay Singh and some liquor businessmen. It has filed a total of six charge sheets in this case till now and had attached assets worth over Rs 128 crore. The ED and the CBI have alleged that the Delhi government’s excise policy to grant licences to liquor traders allowed cartelisation and favoured certain dealers who had allegedly paid bribes for it, a charge strongly refuted by the AAP. The policy was subsequently scrapped and Delhi Lieutenant Governor V K Saxena recommended a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) probe into the irregularities in its formulation and implementation. Later, the ED registered a case under the PMLA.