CM Vijayan daughter’s IT firm caught in rows: From CMRL ‘illegal payment’ to gold smuggling case

The I-T department report quoted in the order of the Interim Board of Settlement under the Central Board of Taxes charged that Veena’s firm had not provided any software or marketing service to the CMRL, which was unearthed, it stated, from the evidence gathered during a search on the premises of the mineral processing company in 2019.

Veena’s Bengaluru-based Exalogic, which began operations in 2014 as a start-up IT firm, has been embroiled in various rows in recent years.

Last year, 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 and when it was up again the reference to PwC director Balakumar as mentor was removed from the website as Suresh had been hired by the PwC, Congress legislator Mathew Kuzhalnadan had then alleged in the Assembly.

Although CM Vijayan had rejected the Congress MLA’s allegation as baseless, Kuzhalnadan had dared him to take legal action against him.

An engineering graduate 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.

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 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.

As per the I-T department’s report, 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. Also, there was another document, which the I-T personnel recovered during the raid, which 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 and so he did not then file Income Tax returns.

The CPI(M) state secretariat has denied any illegality in the dealings of Veena’s firm with the CMRL, calling the controversy “politically motivated”. Vijayan, Veena and Riyas have not responded to the allegations in the matter so far.