MK has just a house and Rs 6 cr

 “Even my house at Gopalapuram in the city, I have already willed to be converted into a hospital for the poor. Apart from this, I have no other immovable property in my name nor have I added to any of my acquisitions in my long public life,” the Tamil Nadu chief minister disclosed.

In a ten-page emotion-tinged letter to DMK party cadres released late in the evening, Karunanidhi said that his Gopalpuram house and his first personal car had been bought much before “I became Minister in the first DMK Cabinet under Annadurai in 1967.”

They were funded from earnings from writing Tamil film scripts since the late 1940s. “It is such a person, whose life is an open book, who is now being dubbed Asia’s richest man,” Karunanidhi replied with biting irony to his critics leveling wealth amassment charges against him in the backdrop of the latest 2G spectrum allocation scam that has engulfed UPA-II regime.

Refuting impressions by some opposition leaders that “I landed in Madras (now Chennai) long years back as a pauper”, implying that he had made all his money in politics later, Karunanidhi pointed out that even before the DMK was launched here in September 1949, he was one of the highest paid script-writers in Tamil cinema then, drawing a princely monthly salary of Rs 500 then from the Salem production house ‘Modern Theatres’.

Stating that even his first car, ‘Vauxhall-4983’, was part-funded by his Tamil film industry colleague and well known comedian those days, late N S Krishnan, he said the present house in which he has been staying had been purchased for Rs 45,000 “before I assumed office as a State Minister”. 

Though his residential house was subsequently modified, the DMK leader claimed he had no other farm house or estates elsewhere and neither did he encroach upon any Government land, taking an indirect dig at Jayalalitha.

Referring to ‘Sun TV Network’ getting consolidated under Kalanidhi Maran’s leadership after the death of his nephew and former Union minister Murasoli Maran, the DMK leader said in October 2005 when the former restructured its business and his family members withdrew from it, “I was in all given Rs 100 crore” (as disinvestment proceeds).

“I accordingly paid Rs 22.50 crore as Income-Tax on those proceeds” and distributed the remaining Rs 77.50 crore to my sons and daughters,” Karunanidhi said, adding, “My individual share at the end of the day was Rs 10 crore.”

From that amount, Rs 5 crore was placed in a fixed deposit, which with interest has grown to nearly Rs 5.66 crore, he pointed out. Besides that, he till date has about Rs 35.90 lakhs in his Savings Bank account.