Kerala opposition leader alleges corruption in multicrore e-mobility project

Congress party on Sunday levelled corruption allegations against Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan over an e-mobility project aimed at introducing electric vehicles on the road by 2020. The opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala alleged that the Chief Minister had a direct role in awarding the contract to PwC, a firm banned by SEBI.

Thiruvananthapuram: Opposition leader and former Kerala Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president Ramesh Chennithala has levelled allegations of corruption against the ruling left government in Kerala over a multicrore e-mobility project.

Chennithala said that government's decision to award the consultancy of the Rs-4500-crore e-mobility project to the multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), without inviting tenders, is mired in corruption.

According to the Congress leader, the firm was facing a two-year ban by Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and the Pinarayi Vijayan-led government violated norms of tender and secretariat manual was not complied with in this case.

The opposition leader also alleged that the Chief Minister had a direct role in awarding the contract to PwC. He further demanded CM to scrap the deal, which involves the purchase of 3000 electric buses for Rs 4500 crore under an e-mobility project.

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The opposition leader said the London-based firm was facing nine legal cases in India alone and that it had suffered a serious dent to its reputation for its role in the Satyam scam.

"Justice A P Shah, the 20th law commission chairman and former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, and his Whistleblowers' Forum had levelled serious charges against PwC, why the deal was still given to them," Chennithala said.

"Justice Shah even wrote to the Chief Minister asking him to drop PwC as the consultant of the Kochi-Palakkad Industrial Corridor and K-FON (Kerala-Fibre Optic Network) projects," he said.

"Why is a communist Chief Minister so interested in a company that exemplifies all that is bad about capitalism? He has to come clean on his bond with PwC," Chennithala questioned.

Kerala's electric vehicle policy targets 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020.