A special court of PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering Act) cases in Visakhapatnam on Friday remanded all four persons arrested by the ED in the Andhra Pradesh Skill Development Corporation scam to judicial custody.
The Enforcement Directorate produced the arrested individuals, including the former MD of Siemens, Soumyadri Sekhar Bose, Vikas Vinayak Khanvelkar, managing director of DesignTech Systems Limited (Pune), Mukul Chandra Agarwal, chief operating Officer of PVSP IT Skills Projects Pvt Ltd and Skillar Enterprises Private Limited (Chattarpur), and Suresh Goyal, chartered accountant of SSRA & Associates, in court, which ordered them to be sent to remand.
The ED has sought the custody of all four accused to question them about the involvement of bureaucrats and politicians in the alleged scam.
The allegation is that in 2015, officials from Siemens Industry Software India and DesignTech Systems conspired with the then TDP government and officials from the government of Andhra Pradesh to misappropriate funds from the state exchequer.
They colluded with government officials such as G Subba Rao, secretary and CEO of AP State Skill Development Corporation, and Dr K Lakshminarayana, director, APSSDC, and projected that the skill development project worth Rs 3,300 crore would be executed with only Rs 330 crore as a contribution from the government of AP.
Suman Bose and Vikas Kanwilkar met then chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu in 2014-15 as part of the scam. Siemens and Design Tech agreed to contribute 90% of the funds if the government contributed 10%.
Siemens Industry Software India and Design Tech had not spent a single rupee from their own resources on this project, but instead siphoned off a major portion contributed by the Government of Andhra Pradesh as its share for the 10% of the project cost, amounting to Rs 371 crore.
The ED alleged that the money was diverted to shell companies such as Allied Computers (Rs 60 crore transferred), Skillers India Pvt Ltd, Knowledge Podium, Cadence Partners, and ETA greens.
