While reacting to The Indian Express report today of the state BJP’s high-level probe committee’s report mentioning how the party made crores from the petrol pump scam in Kerala while the NDA was in power, state BJP president PS Sreedharan Pillai declined to say if his party intended to take some action on the basis of its own probe report.

“This is an internal issue of our party. Even our state committee has yet to view and discuss the probe report. Besides, the report has only passing references (about the petrol pump scam). Where is the evidence to substantiate those? I don’t want to comment any more,” he said.

Interestingly, this was while his predecessor and senior colleague K Raman Pillai, who was state president soon after the scam, was quoted in the probe report saying that the party’s organising secretary for Kerala and Tamil Nadu, PP Mukundan and its state Treasurer, Narayanan Nair, had collected about Rs 18 crore — but accounted for only Rs 2 crore.

Pillai had also gone on to clearly explain in his deposition that official records would show that party workers were asked to pay Rs 20 lakh and others Rs 25 lakh, for getting petrol pumps allotted to them. Meanwhile, the BJP’s official spokesperson for Kerala, B K Shekhar, issued a statement denying the report.

The statement said the report that the “Kerala BJP was involved in (the) petrol pump scam, and a party fact finding committee reported to that effect,’’ was baseless. It added that the party had neither recieved any such complaint, nor had it “appointed any committee for enquiring about it’’.

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