'King of Good Times' wealthiest in RS

Vijay Mallya, an independent MP from Karnataka, is the wealthiest member of the Upper House. With assets worth Rs 615.28 crore, Mallya is far ahead of other crorepati MPs, followed distantly by T Subbarami Reddy, Congress MP from Andhra Pradesh, who owns assets worth Rs 258 crore.

Congress MP from Karnataka, Anil H Lad, who has assets worth about Rs 178 crore, came fourth in the roll of 20 wealthiest members, but he tops another list of the Upper House members with highest liabilities. He has a liability of Rs 35 crore. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, another independent MP from Karnataka, stood at 14th position on the roll of the wealthiest RS members, with assets worth about Rs 37 crore.

Independent watchdog National Election Watch (New) came out with the data after analysing the affidavits on assets and liabilities they filed along with their nominations for elections to the Upper House.

Chandrasekhar, Mallya and Lad and were elected to the RS in 2006, 2007 and 2008.
New, an initiative of the Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR), analysed 224 of the 242 MPs of the RS and found that 129 of them were ‘crorepatis’.

Among the MPs, whom  New covered in its latest analysis, 67 are from Congress and 48 from BJP. Forty seven of the 67 Congress MPs are crorepatis as against 27 among the BJP’s 48. Out of the 224 MPs covered, the value of the average assets of Congress members in RS is Rs 12.69 crore, while for the BJP it is Rs 3.77 crore and Rs 5.9 crore for the BSP.

‘Poorest’

CPM’s Saman Pathak, a MP from West Bengal, is the poorest, with assets worth just Rs 41,000. According to the ADR, the New’s analysis of the affidavits Mallya had filed in 2007 revealed that he had at that time had five criminal cases, including two under Section 420 of the IPC, pending against him at that time. The analysed affidavits of 10 RS MPs from Karnataka found only Mallya to have criminal cases pending against him at that time.

Of the 224 RS MPs covered by the New study, 42 – eight each from the Congress and BJP and five from the BSP – had criminal cases against them when they had been elected to the Upper House.