Mamu's boy all the way
Both the maternal and paternal grandfathers of Vijay Singla were commission agents in the state. Artiyas, or commission agents, make a living by charging farmers a fixed commission for arranging their meetings with buyers. It is a lucrative profession in agrarian states like Punjab. Singla continued the family tradition, only he allegedly arranged high-stakes meetings.
In Chandigarh's business circles, 42-year-old Singla is best known as a Union cabinet minister's close relative and, therefore, the access card to the corridors of power.
Singla was apprehended last week while accepting a bribe of Rs 90 lakh, apparently to swing a coveted Railway Board post for Mahesh Kumar, currently member (staff) of the Railway Board. With CBI taking up the case, Singla suddenly found himself in the limelight, something he had deliberately shunned all these years.
Singla kept a low profile even as his uncle, Pawan Kumar Bansal, rose in political prominence. The low-key businessman is the son of Bansal's younger sister, who died about five months ago. While he is disinclined to be politically involved in Congress affairs, he always kept a wary eye on the political life of his uncle. Observers have been quick to draw parallels between Bansal's rise - from lawyer to Chandigarh MP in 1991 to Minister of State for Finance in 2006 and then to Union Railway Minister last year - and Singla's fortunes.
Bansal is at his palatial house in Chandigarh every weekend, attending four to five public functions and holding meetings. On his weekly sojourns in his constituency, it is Singla who organised the schedule of his meetings. Those seeking an audience with Bansal would have to go through the nephew. "The Railways have a huge budget and even getting registered as a supplier is a big deal," says a Chandigarh-based industrialist. Just before his arrest, Singla had arranged a meeting between the local industrialists and the minister over the conversion policy for Chandigarh's Industrial Area.
The Bansal and Singla families were close. So close that they moved from their house in Sector 6, Panchkula and bought two adjacent bungalows of four kanal each (house numbers 105 and 106) in Chandigarh's posh (and expensive) Sector 28 five years ago. This was at a time when property prices in Chandigarh had gone through the ceiling, fuelled by a steep demand from NRI buyers. This was also the time that Bansal had gone from being a mere Lok Sabha back bencher to Minister of State for Finance.
| SINGLA’S FIRMS |
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JTL Infra Whole-time director Deals in: Steel tubes/pipes |
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Jagan Industries |
Deals in: Pipes, tubes & fittings
Director
Deals in: Builders & developers
Director
Deals in: Real estate
Director
Deals in: Stainless steel pipes
According to people close to the family, Singla started out in business with the incorporation of Jagan Tubes in 1991,which commenced commercial production in Dera Bassi in 1994 - three years after Bansal was elected to the 10 th Lok Sabha. Within a year, the manufacturing company was listed on the Over the Counter Exchange of India. In 2008, its name was changed to JTL Infra and last year in October it got listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange, weeks before Bansal assumed office as railway minister. The parent company, Jagan Industries, had come up around the time when Bansal was doing the groundwork for contesting the Lok Sabha elections
from Chandigarh.
Singla's business soon moved beyond the domestic market. In 2003, he went to Ethiopia and bagged an order for supplying steel pipes. Today, he is the leading exporter of pipes to Ethiopia and also sends his products to Sri Lanka, USA and some European countries. Currently, he is a director in JTL Infra, Jagan Industries, Himani Steels, Chetan Industries, Jagan Realtors, MVM Metal and Alloys and Radian Ferrometals. He has a steel pipe manufacturing unit in Raipur (Madhya Pradesh) and a steel tube factory in Kala Amb in Himachal Pradesh.
His business interests have expanded now into manufacturing, retail, real estate and education. Most of the business ventures have stakeholders from the family. Bansal's two sons, Amit and Manish, and cousin Chetan Singla (Madan Mohan's son) are the major stakeholders in most of the projects.
Sources close to him say that he purchased an industrial plot in the Chandigarh Industrial Area and paid Rs 100 crore as conversion charges. The construction of a shopping mall, Acropolis, has been completed on that four-acre plot, and is today valued at Rs 1,000 crore. When Bansal was with the finance ministry, his relatives bought several non-performing assets (NPAs) of banks at throwaway prices. Singla bought the premises of Modern Bakery (an NPA with IDBI Bank) at Chandigarh Industrial Area where the shopping mall has now come up.
The Chandigarh administration allegedly allowed him to construct Acropolis without environment clearance. Recently, the Environment Impact Assessment Authority wrote to the Chandigarh administration to take legal action against Mirage Infra (a subsidiary of Jagan Group) for violations of the Environment Protection Act in the Acropolis project. According to company officials, the funding for Acropolis is planned through debt and equity. It is projected to have 680,000 square feet of developed area providing high-end offices and premium retail location.
Singla also purchased a 90-acre plot in Dera Bassi (20 km from Chandigarh) for a residential project and another 30 acres in Zirakpur (on Chandigarh's outskirts) for a school. Singla has also acquired showrooms in Chandigarh's Sector 28 in the recent past.
People who know him describe him as ambitious, though those ambitions are limited to expanding his businesses. That is perhaps why he recently joined the influential Aggarwal Sabha of Panchkula, but "hasn't been very interactive," according to a member of the body.
Of course, the plot has moved now from Singla to Bansal himself, leading to his resignation yesterday. Local BJP leader, Satya Pal Jain, who heads BJP's legal cell and is a former MP from Chandigarh, claims that Bansal's sons were directors in companies floated by Singla and Singla's companies had given Bansal's address in Chandigarh's Sector 28. "If they are using his address for their companies, how can there not be a business link?" Jain asks.
Political heir to an unmarried aunt
By Probal Basak
While far away in Chandigarh one nephew shunned the limelight that politics brings for the fruits that fall in its shadow, in Kolkata another nephew provides an alter-ego of the opposite sort. In the ranks of Trinamool Congress, Abhishek Banerjee enjoys the distinction of being the party's only prominent face from Mamata Banerjee's immediate family. But the 26-year-old nephew hardly bears any resemblance to Pishi's (paternal aunt) brand of "Ma Mati Manush" politics.
Much before CPI-M leader Gautam Deb's allegations about financial irregularities by his company, Leaps and Bounds, made him a regular feature in local media, Abhishek Banerjee hit the headlines with his lavish wedding in Delhi last year.
Abhishek, son of Mamata's elder brother Amit, tied the knot with Jasmeet Ahuja whom he met while doing his graduation in management at IIPM Delhi (he did his MBA from the same institute in 2009, according to his Facebook account), after passing out from MP Birla Foundation Higher Secondary School in Kolkata. An engagement party at Le Meridian followed by a marriage ceremony at a south Delhi gurudwara and a lavish reception party at Grand Hotel in Vasant Kunj all were in stark contrast to his aunt's positioning of a simple and austere person.
Differences apart, Mamata's faith in Abhishek is unmistakable. In 2011, the TMC supremo allowed a rather significant aberration from her long-observed practice of not allowing family members to hold key posts in the party by creating a new platform in the form of an NGO - the All India Trinamool Yuva - with Abhishek at its helm. Also, Banerjee chose the best possible occasion of TMC's first-ever rally that had a gathering of about a million, at Kolkata's Brigade Parade Grounds on July 21, 2011 (months after assuming power in the state) to make the announcement that many interpreted as launch pad for her political heir.
To create a parallel youth wing of the party for her nephew despite having already established youth arms of the party like Trinamool Youth Congress and Trinamool Chhatra Parishad was, at least on the face of it, a smart political move to catapult Abhishek without causing any disturbance to the party's prevailing organisational structure. Many in TMC, however, believe, the West Bengal chief minister wanted to curb the growing clout of party MP and Trinamool Youth Congress president Shubhendu Adhikary. The TMC strongman from East Medinipur, with a mass following of his own, is said to have high ambitions, which Banerjee wanted to nip in the bud.
Meanwhile, his business interests have become secondary for Abhishek as he steadily turns into a full-time politician. Perhaps because of his shift of focus on politics, his company, which was floated by him in 2009 has not grown in "leaps and bounds".
A section in the website of "Leaps and Bounds" reads, "...in 2009, with no background in business he (Abhishek) incorporated his own company with a vision of providing quality and constructive consultancy services to venerated corporation across the nation." CPI-M alleged criminal misinformation about the date of the company's incorporation as filings with the Registrar of Companies shows an April 2012 date.
The company was quick to clarify that Abhishek floated "Leaps and Bounds" in 2009 as a partnership firm with his mother, Lata Banerjee, and was incorporated as a company only on April 2, 2012.
Deb had also asked whether the required regulatory approvals had been acquired for operating in the finance sector, including insurance and micro-finance, listed on its website by the firm as its business interests. Sujoy Bhadra, one of the company directors, says, "We have no business interests in microfinance, insurance or real estate. These are only in the planning stage." Also, Bhadra pointed out the company was primarily into consultancy and that the turnover was a mere Rs 2.5 crore last year.
Amid the controversy, Abhishek remained silent and later filed a defamation case against Deb in a local court in Kolkata. He also successfully convinced the TMC leadership that it was not a "serious" matter.
So, it has been business as usual for Abhishek at Trinamool Bhavan in Topsia, Kolkata. He became a frequenter at the TMC headquarters by the end of 2010. Since the 2011 assembly election campaign, he has been in charge of handling party's social networking sites along with party MP Derek O'Brien.
In fact, party insiders say, on Mamata Banerjee's insistence, O'Brien has been mentoring her nephew in political affairs. Party leaders, however, think O'Brien may not have much tutoring to do. As senior TMC leader Subrata Mukherjee confirmed, Abhishek has "always been a politically-minded man".
Surely, this has not gone unnoticed. There is talk that Abhishek's aunt - in yet another step towards anointing him as her political heir - will field him in the next Lok Sabha elections.
