While deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia is in the CBI custody for five days in the Delhi liquor case, an investigation by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) has revealed that the public opinion called by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) on the excise policy was an “eyewash” and never meant to be implemented.
In its investigation and charge sheet filed last month, the ED has revealed that around 4,000 emails were sent by hired PR companies to the Delhi government to influence the excise policy.
The CBI is also probing the case on similar lines, and both the agencies may have similarities in the investigation.
The ED revealed that C Arvind, DANICS officer, had told the probe agency that Manish Sisodia had asked him to draft the excise policy in a “particular way”.
“There was no discussion in the GoM meetings about fixing the wholesale profit at 12%. Suddenly in the mid of March 2021, C Arvind was called by Manish Sisodia to the residence of Arvind Kejriwal, (where Satyender Jain was also present) and Manish Sisodia handed over a document to C Arvind, which was a draft GoM report proposing the wholesale margin of 12% and asked him to prepare the draft GoM report on the basis of the said document,” probe says.
Similarly, to influence the policy formulation, 4,000 emails were sent. “It has been revealed in the investigation that Benoy Babu was part of the conspiracy to send 4,000 emails to the authorities through media agencies hired by ISWAI. Most of these emails were sent by creating email IDs so that the some may be projected as sent by general public to the government authorities,” the charge sheet in the same case said.
This was because the expert committee report did not favour the existing retailer of the Old Policy regime and was creating a lot of negative publicity about the same, the ED said. Two hired agencies created 3,000 email IDs and arranged 1,000 other email IDs through several sources. They created draft formats and sent 4,000 emails to the Delhi government in favour of the Expert Committee report.
Allegations on GoM
There were three ministers in GoM: Manish Sisodia, Satyendar Jain and Kailash Gehlot, and the first two are already in the custody.
The ED charge sheet gave the following instances where the public opinion was not accepted.
• The report of the expert committee and the comments received from the stakeholders/general public were placed before the Council of Ministers in the Cabinet Meeting, which decided to constitute a Group of Ministers (GoM) to examine all aspects of the current system, report of the Expert Committee and the comments received from the stakeholders/general public. Sufficient time was available to seek public comments, more so, when the policy was drastically changed. However, no comments were sought from the public on the same.
• The final policy was uploaded on the official website of Delhi Excise on 05.07.2021, the investigation says.
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