For the last nine years, Telugu Desam Party president and former Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu and his family members have been declaring their assets, whether they are real or notional.
Initially, Naidu used to declare the assets in September for the financial year concluding on March 31 of the same year.
For the last three years, his son Lokesh had been declaring the assets in October and in fact, in 2018, he declared it in December.
But in 2019, neither Naidu or nor Lokesh declared the family assets. Since nobody is interested to know about their assets, which anyway the people are not believing, everybody thought the family had stopped the practice. Nobody bothered to question as to why they have not done it.
But on Thursday, Lokesh suddenly declared the family assets. Naturally this raised many an eyebrow. One wondered why he should declare the assets for 2018-19, when the 2019-20 financial year is coming to a close in a month.
The YSR Congress party suspects the timing of the disclosure of Naidu assets. It has alleged that Lokesh had intentionally disclosed the assets and liabilities of his family members to bluff the public amidst the row of Income Tax raids.
YSRC legislator and chief whip G Srikanth Reddy said there was no need for Lokesh to disclose the fake assets in front of the public as everyone knows how corrupt the father and son are.
“Lokesh should explain to the public what has driven him to disclose his assets all of a sudden? All those assets are duplicate and fake. He has to disclose the illegal earnings including those that were deposited in Singapore and other countries along with the list of assets of their close associates,” he said.
Reddy pointed out that in the recent IT raids on Naidu’s former personal secretary’s houses, Rs 2000 crore illegal transactions were identified.
“If we take the list of all his close associates, then the illegal transactions will go over Rs seven lakh crores,” he pointed out.
He said Naidu only preached morals but never follows them. Naidu’s hawala racket is deep-rooted and extended up to Ahmed Patel in Delhi. Fearing the IT raids, he ran away to Hyderabad and arranged an emergency meeting with his auditors. He has been a lobbyist all through his career and people never treated him as their person.
