Congress targets govt over Rs 22,842 cr loan default case: What took CBI 5 years to lodge FIR

The CBI on Saturday said it has booked ABG Shipyard Ltd (ABGSL) and its former chairman and managing director, Rishi Kamlesh Agarwal, along with then executive director Santhanam Muthaswamy, directors Ashwini Kumar, Sushil Kumar Agarwal and Ravi Vimal Nevetia. Another firm, ABG International Pvt Ltd, has also been booked for criminal conspiracy, cheating, criminal breach of trust and abuse of official position.

Addressing a press conference in Chandigarh, Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said the process of liquidation of ABG Shipyard was initiated in the NCLT, Ahmedabad in August 2017. In June 2019, he said, the loan and bank accounts of ABG Shipyard were declared as “fraud” and five months later, in November, the State Bank of India filed a complaint with the CBI for registration of FIR against ABG Shipyard’s Rishi Agarwal and others. “Despite the apparent fraud and swindling of public money, the CBI, SBI and the Modi government proceeded to complicate the entire matter in bureaucratic wrangling and file pushing,” he alleged.

Surjewala claimed that the SBI filed a second complaint with the CBI in August 2020. “The intriguing part is that in the complaint dated August 25, 2020, the SBI has exonerated all the bankers,” he said. “Why did it take five years after the liquidation proceedings of ABG Shipyard to lodge even an FIR for duping 28 banks of Rs 22,842 crore?…,” he said. “Does this not prove complicity, collusion and connivance of those sitting in the highest echelons of power in the Modi government.”

BJP spokesperson and Rajya Sabha member Syed Zafar Islam said for the Congress to attack the government over the case is like a thief blaming cops for the crime. He said all these loans were given prior to 2014. Due process was followed and the BJP government identified the fraud, he said. “The Congress is brazening it out. It is its government which ran the ‘phone banking’ scam with its senior functionaries forcing banks to sanction loans after accepting commissions from promoters.”

Referring to the scam at a rally at Sikandararau in UP, SP chief Akhilesh Yadav said, “Whenever these major scams take place, people from a particular place are involved. In the scams, which had taken place earlier, a number of people were from that place.”

The ABGSL operates from shipyards at Dahej and Surat in Gujarat.  WITH PTI INPUTS