The Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on Monday hit back at the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) over its allegation that Arvind Kejriwal had during his 49-day stint as the chief minister left a loophole in the CAG audit to save discoms, and alleged that the latter was misleading the people and trying to protect power companies.
"The facts indicate towards wrongdoing in power companies in the first two to four years of their formation. The assets of the government power companies have been transferred. Now, the question is why the BJP, NDA and Piyush Goyal do not want the audit of power companies during the first four to six years of their formation," AAP leader Ashish Ketan told a press conference here.
"Why are they afraid of the audit of initial years of the power companies? The people of Delhi want to know if they have got the right price for the transferred assets," he added.
Khetan further alleged that Power Minister Piyush Goyal's statement has made it clear that the ruling party at the Centre is trying to mislead the people of Delhi.
"Lies have been told, wrong facts have been presented and they are trying to save the power companies. Piyush Goyal said that the AAP wanted a performance audit of the electricity companies from 2002 onwards to be done by CAG," Khetan said.
"He said that the audit of only last eight years is possible as the power companies are not required to keep records older than eight years. This is not true because the Delhi Government has 49 percent stake in BSES Yamuna, BSES Rajdhani, 51 percent is with Anil Ambani's company. Even if Anil Ambani destroys the records, the Delhi Government and the Centre preserve the records," he added.
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Earlier on Sunday, Union Power Minister Piyush Goyal had questioned AAP's intention behind ordering a CAG audit of power companies in Delhi since 2002 and had said that the exercise had not been carried out because records of only the past eight years is maintained by any company.
"He (Kejriwal) claims he was a tax commissioner... Then why order audit of books that you know would not be easily available, instead of the records that are available? Obviously, the audit hasn't begun in the absence of accounts for the cut-off period (2002). As a revenue service officer he should have known this... maybe he was never serious about the audit... maybe, he left the loophole to protect the discoms," Goyal had said.
