A day after the arrest of former Kerala Prime Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s secretary M Sivasankar in a money laundering case, the ruling CPI (M) suffered another setback on Thursday after the Directorate of Enforcement arrested the secretary’s son. of the Kodiyeri Balakrishnan party, Bineesh Kodiyeri, in a narcotics case.
Summoned to the emergency bureau in Bengaluru for the second time, he was arrested after he gave no convincing answers about the alleged funding of drug trafficking after a 3-hour questioning, a senior officer said. Later it will be presented in court.
The problems started for Kodiyeri after the defendant of drug trafficking in Bengaluru, Anoop Mohammad, gave a statement to the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) mentioning his name. He said that Bineesh Kodiyeri, Balakrishnan’s second son, had helped him a lot in his “business venture.” Later, his name is also on Mohammad’s call list.
Kodiyeri later admitted that he knew Mohammad and helped him set up a hotel in Bengaluru, but was unaware of his alleged drug deals. But later, the ED discovered that two Kodiyeri shell companies, B Capital Solutions and B Capital Forex, were allegedly involved in a lot of shady deals. Floating in 2015, both firms had failed to file tax returns and other formalities and ED suspects these firms were filed for alleged money laundering and hawala transactions.
During the investigation, the ED also discovered that Rs 50 lakh reached Mohammad’s account in the past six months and suspects that Kodiyeri was one of the drug cartel funders. Previously, the DE had frozen the transactions of all its properties.
During the investigation of the gold smuggling case, the DE also discovered that there was a close link between gold smuggling and psychedelic drug cases. The smuggling case came to light on July 5 after 30 kg of gold was seized from a shipment that had arrived in the name of the UAE consular post in Thiruvananthapuram. And the drug case came to light on August 28 after the arrest of Anoop Mohammad and two other people in Bengaluru. There are reports that the third defendant in the gold smuggling case, KT Ramees and Anoop Mohammad, were friends.
CPI (M) Secretary General Sitaram Yecury said in Delhi that there was no crisis in the party or government in Kerala and Kodiyeri Balakrishnan had made his position very clear that the party will not interfere in the ongoing case.
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