Former Karnataka Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai.
Credit: DH Photo/Krishnakumar P S
New Delhi: Former Chief Minister Basavaraj Bommai on Monday said that the decision to allocate an industrial plot to a private company, in which Kannada actor Ranya Rao was the majority shareholder, was taken by the then Industrial Minister in 2023. Rao was recently arrested in a gold smuggling case.
"If any company having plans to invest up to Rs 500 crore sought land to set up a plant, the high power committee headed by the Industrial Minister will take a decision. Over and above Rs 500 crore investment by a company's application of seeking land was also dealt by the high power committee headed by the Chief Minister. This was a practice for many years in the state," Bommai told reporters here.
"Since Ranya's firm Ksiroda India sought land with an investment proposal of Rs 138 crore, it was cleared by the then Industrial Minister in 2023. So I am nowhere in the picture in the allotment," he said.
Defending the BJP Government decision in 2023 to allot land, the Haveri Lok Sabha member from the BJP said that all investment proposals were vetted by a committee headed by the Principal Secretary of Heavy and Medium Industries Department. "They would go through the proposal submitted by the investors and recommend the proposal to the panel headed by the Industry Minister if the investment was up to Rs 500 crore," he said.
"Since the government is always keen to encourage new investors, we allot the land in good faith. Sometimes investors failed to fulfill the promises they made while submitting the proposals. Such things were dealt with by existing laws," he added.
Explaining that under the previous BJP regime in the state, once the land was allotted, a notice was issued for payment. "In this particular case, since the payment was not made by the investor, land was not handed over to them," he said.
In 2023, Murugesh R Nirani was the Industrial Minister in the Bommai-led state government.
Insisting that a detailed probe needed to be conducted to unearth the full details of the gold smuggling case, Bommai said that only a CBI probe could determine whether the current allegation that two ministers were involved is actually true or not.