Tharoor refutes charges on CWG payment
Remuneration much less than what he charged for ‘even a single speech’
Shashi Tharoor has taken $30,000 from the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee as consultancy fee and he now claims that it was much less than what he generally seeks to deliver even a single speech.
Tharoor, a Congress MP from Kerala, landed in yet another controversy after the Comptroller and Auditor General found that he had been hired by the CWG OC headed by Suresh Kalmadi as a consultant between September 2008 and January 2009.
The CAG is looking into the dealings of the CWG OC, which has been under a cloud in the wake of the alleged scam in preparations of the Games. The audit purportedly found that he had attended the CWG OC’s meetings for altogether 12 days, for four days each in the months of September and October, 2008 and in January 2009.
However, the CAG, according to the sources, did not find any illegality involved with the payment. Tharoor, a former United Nations under secretary-general, had received the payment at his account in HSBC Dubai in 2009. He had won the elections from the Thiruvananthapuram constituency in Kerala in the same year. He took over as the Minister of State for External Affairs in May 2009.
“The consultancy fee charged was a token sum, and the total sum paid ($30,000 less taxes) was far below the fee that I used to command even just to make a single speech,” the high-profile author-cum-politician said.
In a statement issued on Sunday, Tharoor said: “My association with the CWG as a consultant relates to a different phase of my life, when I was a private citizen with no relationship with the Government, an independent consultant working out of New York, quite legally supporting the CWG for which I was officially, formally and legally paid. The consultancy services were rendered between September 2008 and January 2009. In other words, the services relate to a period well before I entered public life.”
He claimed to have closed his old office after moving to India and entering “into public life” here and added that he had also “discontinued any and all remunerative activities related to government institutions”.
Tharoor also defended retaining his account in HSBC’s branch in Dubai. “I legally retain my foreign bank accounts as all former Non Resident Indians are entitled to do under the Reserve Bank of India rules, and there is no impropriety in doing so,” he said.
Tharoor has already courted many controversies during his less-than-two-year long career in active politics. In September 2009, he called economy class of commercial airliners as “cattle class” in a post on Twitter. The Congress had termed his remarks as “insensitive”, forcing him to apologise later. He had again tweeted his way into controversy in December 2009, when he had questioned the Government’s decision to tighten the visa regime on the social networking site. He finally had to resign as Minister of State for External Affairs in April 2010, after being accused of unduly mentoring the Kochi IPL, while its promoter Rendezvous Sports World had offered his friend Sunanda Pushkar a sweat equity of Rs 70 crore. He later married Pushkar.
Tharoor said that he was a consultant for international and national engagement and promotion of the Commonwealth Youth Games, not the CWG itself and he spared “a considerable portion” of his time and effort for the purpose.
He said that he had attended preparatory meetings and the CWYG itself and “addressed various audiences in support of these games, including the assembled athletes from around the world in Pune on the eve of the CWYG.”
