CBI files chargesheet against Paul, 4 others
Paul Zacharia, whom the progressive writers’ forum, describe as Malayalam literature’s lone avant-garde writer and who has been honoured with the Kerala Government’s highest literary award, Thunchathu Ezhuthachan in 2020, finds himself as an accused in a multi-crore financial embezzlement case.
The chargesheet filed by the Central Bureau of Investigation against Zacharia and four others in a Thiruvananthapuram court states that the accused misused the foreign aid received from Word and Deed (W&D), a Netherlands-based evangelist organisation, allegedly for rehabilitating street children in the districts of Kottayam and Ernakulam and to start schools for re-educating them.
But the accused, according to the CBI, purchased four acres of land in Ernakulam suburb which they later sold to a private individual at an exorbitant rate. The children who were inmates of the resettlement centre were admitted to Government schools and put in orphanages, said the chargesheet.
The financial and procedural irregularities were exposed by some of the members of the director board of Good Samaritan Project India and Catholic Reformation Literature Society, two evangelical organisations which were the beneficiaries of the aid from W&D. The organisation W&D is headed by celebrated evangelists like John Otten and Rick Postma, who are the main strategists behind the mission launched by Free Reformed Church.
Though the alleged crime was committed in 2006, the then Government and the police chief, Jacob Punnoose, had dismissed the pleas submitted by the director board members of Good Samaritan Project India and CRLS demanding a probe into the charges. TP Senkumar, who took over as the State Police Chief after the retirement of Punnoose ordered a probe into the allegations. The W&D too had come out stating that financial impropriety had happened in the case and called for a high-level probe into the case.
The CBI’s move to probe the case was the fallout of the new law which mandated that all foreign exchange cases involving financial irregularities of Rs 1 crore or more should be probed by the elite investigation agency. The chargesheet has been filed by the CBI in the chief judicial magistrate court at Thiruvnanthapuram.