 "Enforcement Directorate")
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday arrested T Venkattram Reddy, former chairman, and promoter of Deccan Chronicle Holdings Limited (DCHL), along with the company’s former director P K Iyer and auditor Mani Oomen.
The ED has alleged that Reddy and others were involved in money laundering and defrauded banks by submitting fake documents.
Reddy (53) is the former owner and promoter of the Deccan Chronicle Holdings Limited (DCHL), which publishes the English daily, Deccan Chronicle.
After his father, T Chandrashekar Reddy, who was a member of Congress and a Rajya Sabha member from 1981 to 1993, passed away, Reddy became the chairman and editor-in-chief of Deccan Chronicle. He subsequently served the remaining two years of his father’s term as Rajya Sabha MP, but was not renominated by the Congress, after which he quit politics.
He was also the first owner of the former Indian Premier League (IPL) team, Deccan Chargers.
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Why was he arrested?
The ED arrested him for his involvement in money laundering in the case of loans taken from Canara Bank. The agency has stated that Reddy misused Canara Bank’s short-term corporate loans for personal use and diverted the money to other purposes than mentioned.
The ED followed it up after the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered six FIRs against Reddy, DCHL, and Iyer, accusing them of defrauding banks and defaulting on loan repayments worth crores.
On July 9, 2013, the CBI registered the first of its six FIRs after the Secunderabad branch of Canara Bank filed a complaint against DCHL when the company failed to repay a portion of the Rs 1,230 crore loan availed of.
In the FIR, Reddy and the DCHL were accused of criminal conspiracy and he and the company’s auditors were accused of cheating Canara Bank by submitting cooked-up financial statements and concealing liabilities and borrowings from other banks and financial institutions.
The loans were taken for investment in DCHL but they were diverted to other business ventures such as the IPL franchise, Odyssey chain of bookstores, and chartered airlines. The ED and the CBI also accused Reddy of using loans to purchase luxury cars and maintain his flamboyant life. These expenditures led to huge financial losses for DCHL and it defaulted on returning its loans for the first time in early 2013.
