Delhi Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia alleged on Saturday that Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma awarded a contract for Covid Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) kits to a company linked to his wife. The minister said that he had the documents to prove that the CM grossly overpaid for the gear.
“Himanta Biswa Sarma awarded the contract to his wife’s company. He paid ₹ 990 for the PPE kits while others were purchased at ₹ 600 a piece from another company on the same day. This is a huge crime,” Sisodia claimed.
The “big expose” by the Aam Aadmi Party leader followed a teaser by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and was pitched as a response to the arrest of Delhi’s Health Minister Satyendar Jain in an alleged money laundering case.
“Will the BJP have courage to take action against its own leader or will it keep hounding us with made-up cases?” he said.
The charges were based on an investigative report published on the news website The Wire two days ago. The report has been strongly refuted by CM Sarma and his wife Riniki Bhuyan Sharma as “unfounded”. Sarma said he would sue Sisodia for defamation.
The report cited a series of RTI enquiries to claim that the Assam government placed four COVID-19 related emergency medical supply orders to three firms owned by Himanta Biswa Sarma’s wife and his family’s business associate in 2020. The CM was the Health Minister of the state then.
Earlier in the day, Kejriwal had stepped up his attack on the central government over the arrest of Satyendar Jain and announced that Sisodia would be “exposing” a corruption scandal involving a senior BJP leader.
Sharing a news report titled “Not an accused, Jain being quizzed: ED”, the Delhi Chief Minister asserted that the arrested minister can’t be called corrupt, since the Centre itself has contended that he is not an accused in the case.
Jain was arrested by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in a case of money laundering on May 30. The probe agency alleged that the minister in the Arvind Kejriwal government was involved in hawala transactions with a Kolkata-based firm in 2015-16.
The arrest sparked a fresh war between Arvind Kejriwal and the central government, in which the Aam Aadmi Party and other opposition leaders like Mamata Banerjee and Telangana’s K Chandrashekar Rao have often allegedly used central agencies to harass them.
