CBI arrests AP home secretary in land scam

IAS officer was key to state diluting its stake in Rs 4,300 crore project

The bureaucracy in Andhra Pradesh was on Monday shaken as senior IAS officer, B P Acharya was taken into custody for his alleged involvement in the EMAAR-MGF scandal that caused a Rs 4,300-crore loss to the state exchequer.

The CBI arrested Acharya, principal secretary in the Home Department, in connection with the Emaar Properties scam. Acharya appeared before the investigating agency on Monday morning. After a four-hour grilling, the CBI sleuths took him into custody.

The CBI court remanded the senior IAS officer in CBI custody for two days. Acharya, who was one of the most powerful men in the YSR regime, on Monday appeared panicky and distraught outside the CBI camp office — Dilkusha Guest House — as he tried to make last minute calls to his godfathers, in vain. He snubbed the  media persons who tried to interact with him.

Though the CBI has arrested only two IAS officers so far, Srilakshmi and Rajagopal, it has already interrogated nearly half a dozen IAS officers, including the present Tea Board Chairman M G V K Bhanu, K Prabhakar Reddy and other senior officials of the CMO of late YS Rajasekhara Reddy , in connection with the scam. Acharya was the Managing Director of Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure Corporation (APIIC) from 2005- 2009 when the irregularities occurred. He has been named accused number one in the EMAAR FIR filed before the CBI designated court three months ago.

The CBI has stepped up its probe and is closing in on the key players in the scam, with the deadline for the filing of the chargesheet being Tuesday.

Acharya is the fourth person to be arrested in the EMAAR case. Recently, the CBI had arrested Sunil Reddy, a close aide of the YSR Congress president Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy and Vijayaraghavan, the CEO of EMAAR group, last week.

Koneru Prasad, the enterprenuer who had stuck a deal with the EMAAR and the YSR government for retailing the EMAAR Villas, has already been taken into custody .

Acharya has played a crucial role in the APIIC deal with Emaar Properties and the subsequent dilution of the government’s stake in the project from 26 percent to 6.5 per cent, thus causing a huge revenue loss to the state government.

It all began with the report of the Vigilance and Enforcement (V&E) wing of the state government probing the APIIC-Emaar land deal. The report pointed to a nexus between Stylish Homes Real Estate Pvt Ltd andthe Emaar group and sought it to be further investigated.

Said to be floated by industrialist Koneru Prasad, Stylish Homes Real Estate Pvt Ltd allegedly sold villas and apartments worth crores of rupees and carried out its operations in a quiet manner.

On the one hand, it sold away a majority of prime properties at Hyderabad’s prestigious IT cluster as a marketing agent for EMAAR and on the other, it saw to it that the money collected from such sales was shared in two parts -one official and the other unofficial.

The official part was only a minuscule (less than 15 per cent of the actual cost) collected in Hyderabad while the collection of the unofficial part (more than 85 per cent of the cost of the units) was actually done in New Delhi.

In other words, it meant  a loss of Rs 4500 crore to the state exchequer.