The Enforcement Directorate’s radar is now on Veena Vijayan, the daughter of Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan. On Wednesday, the ED initiated a probe into an alleged illegal payment scandal involving Veena, registering the case based on a complaint from Shone George, a member of the Kottayam district panchayat and son of senior politician P C George, who recently joined the BJP. He moved the ED seeking a probe into Veena’s information technology firm, the Exalogic Solutions Private Limited. Veena has been under the scanner of various central government agencies after an Income Tax (IT) department report in 2023, pertaining to the Kochi-based Cochin Minerals and Rutile Limited (CMRL), stated that firm allegedly made “illegal payment” of Rs 1.72 crore to Exalogic Solutions Private Limited, over three years from 2018-19, even though the latter did not provide it any service. The many rows involving her tech firm Veena had been in the eye of the storm since her engineering days, being drawn into political conversations in Kerala. Vijayan’s opponents had targeted him when Veena was studying in a private engineering college in Tamil Nadu in early 2000s, pointing to the CPI(M)’s opposition to self-financing private colleges in Kerala in those days. Later, her choice of Bengaluru for establishing Exalogic was also criticised, given the CPI(M)-led Left’s bids to promote Kerala as a major IT destination. Veena’s career in the IT sector has been in the limelight when she joined the RP Techsoft International — an IT venture under the Middle East-based R P Group promoted by billionaire Ravi Pillai — as the CEO in Thiruvananthapuram in 2012, prior to which she had a stint with the IT firm Oracle for a few years. Veena founded her firm after stepping down from the RP Techsoft. She is its only director. Exalogic, whose paid-up capital is Rs 1 lakh, has been engaged in the software and consultancy services. It is currently, however, a “dormant” company.The Bengaluru-based company, which began operations in 2014 as a start-up IT firm, has been embroiled in various rows in recent years. In 2020, Swapna Suresh, a key accused in the 2020 gold smuggling scandal, had alleged that Veena was the “mastermind” behind the controversial Sprinklr deal that allowed the US-based firm Sprinklr to collate health data of the Kerala people under the Covid quarantine without taking their individual consent. Taking a cue from this allegation, the principal Opposition Congress had tried to link Veena with Suresh. While raising a debate on the gold smuggling case in the state Assembly in June 2022, the Congress had alleged that a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) director Jaik Balakumar had been a “mentor” of Veena’s IT firm and that it was the PwC that hired Suresh as a consultant for the Space Park project of the Kerala government’s Information Technology Department after she had quit the UAE Consulate as its executive secretary in 2019. After the gold smuggling case came to light in July 2020, Exalogic’s website was down for a brief period. As per the I-T department’s report in 2023, CMRL had entered into a service level agreement with Exalogic in 2017 for the development and management of software with a monthly remuneration of Rs 3 lakh. Another document, which the I-T personnel recovered during the raid, purportedly indicated that CMRL had engaged Veena as its IT and marketing consultant on a retaining basis from 2017 for a monthly remuneration of Rs 5 lakh. Following the CMRL payoff row involving Veena, the Congress has sought to rake up another controversy, charging that this payment was not reflected in the election affidavit of her husband Muhammed Riyas, a CPI(M) leader and Minister for Public Works, when he contested from the Beypore Assembly constituency in the 2021 polls. Riyas’s affidavit uploaded in the Election Commission (EC)’s website shows Veena’s income in 2016-17 as Rs 8,25,708, which grew to 10,42,864 in 2017-18 and to Rs 29,94,521 in 2020-21. Her source of income has been shown in the affidavit as consultancy. The market value of Veena’s self-acquired assets is Rs 1,28,81200. Riyas did not have any source of income from 2017-18 to 2020-21. He also did not then file I-T returns during this period.
