The infamous solar scam on Sunday returned to haunt Kerala’s beleaguered Chief Minister Oommen Chandy ahead of the crucial May 16 Assembly election with a letter written by con woman Saritha S Nair, main accused in the scam, accusing him of abusing her sexually at his official residence, the Cliff House in Thiruvananthapuram, appearing in a TV channel.
The letter, said to have been written by Saritha on July 19, 2013 when she was in police custody in Perumbavoor after her arrest in the solar scam, also said that a former Union Minister had raped her at the house of a State Minister and the personal assistant of a key Minister in the Chandy Cabinet had tried to “gift” her to several former Central Ministers.
“Baseless allegation,” was how Chandy reacted to the charge as television channels continued airing reports quoting the letter allegedly written by Saritha, on Sunday. “Clearly, there is a conspiracy connected to the election behind this. This will be probed and the truth found out. I view this as part of a bid to topple my Government,” the Chief Minister said in Kottayam.
“I myself had written the letter,” Saritha told the TV channel which had brought her letter to the public domain. “The handwriting in it is mine and I own up whatever is said in that. Every word mentioned in it is true. I don’t deny anything. However, I don’t want to offer further explanations on matters mentioned in it,” she said.
Ironically, the explosive ‘disclosures’ came out on an evening when Chandy was relishing the joy of scoring a huge political victory over his foes within the Congress after the party high command reportedly bowed to the pressures he exerted on it to let the tainted members in his Cabinet and his loyalists fight the election as party candidates.
Describing how close she was to Chandy, his family and the Cliff House, Saritha says in her letter that she did not expect such kind of an immoral approach from a man - the Chief Minister - whom she had considered as a father figure. She also said that she had been an associate in several land deals carried out by Chandy and relatives through Benamis.
Interestingly, the charge leveled in the letter against Chandy is in agreement with the allegation leveled earlier by Saritha’s former live-in partner and solar scam co-accused Biju Radhakrishnan before the judicial commission probing the scam that the Chief Minister had sexual relationship with the con woman.
Saritha herself had rejected Biju’s allegation then. Biju had then claimed that he had evidences to substantiate his charge but the dramatic efforts to seize these from Coimbatore had ended in a fiasco. However, Saritha had later accused Chandy of taking Rs 1.90 crore as bribe from her promising to help her in her solar power business.