K’taka plot thickens: Documents show CM freed more govt land to help family,friends

The request for the denotification of the land was made by its owner B R Shetty,a Dubai-based Indian business tycoon,on August 18,2008,a couple of months after Yeddyurappa became the Chief Minister of Karnataka,according to documents of the denotification process released by Opposition leaders who chose to be anonymous. After it was denotified,a part of the land,2.5 acres,valued at around Rs 38.15 crore in the market,was sold for Rs 3.37 crore to a firm Besto Infrastructure Bangalore Ltd.

Besto is a subsidiary of Besto Ice Cream,a partner in a real estate firm,Davalagiri Developers,run by Yeddyurappa’s sons Raghavendra,Vijayendra and son-in-law R N Sohan Kumar.

Incidentally,the new subsidiary was created on June 23,just a month after the denotification. The company purchased a portion of the denotified land from Shetty on August 4,2010. According to the documents released,the directors of Besto Infrastructure are those shown as partners of Davalagiri Developers.

* In the second case,Karnataka businessman S S Ugendar paid Rs 2 crore to a firm run by the Chief Minister’s son-in-law and daughters-in-law for “acquiring shares” in their company,Bhagath Homes. This is shown in the financial statement of the company for the year ending March 2009. However,the following year’s statement does not show him as a share-holder.

On January 6,2010,2.05 acres was denotified in the proposed HSR Layout in Bangalore and on March 5,2010 the land was bought by a company Elyon Developers headed by Ugendar for Rs 2.20 crore against an approximate market value of Rs 12.6 crore.

Yeddyurappa has been arguing that denotifications are permitted under law and that all Chief Ministers have done it. Yeddyurappa’s press secretary R P Jagadish on Tuesday night said the Chief Minister would not like to react anymore to these allegations. “The party president,Nitin Gadkari,has said that he is satisfied with the answers given by the Chief Minister,that he has done well for the development of the state. The Chief Minister has said that denotifications are legal,” he said.

Yeddyurappa is also accused of “ordering” the denotification of 0.5 acre outside Bangalore in the Rachenahalli village in favour of his sons. The land had been acquired by the Bangalore Development Authority for creating a public layout. The land was bought by the sons when Yeddyurappa was the deputy chief minister and denotified when he became Chief Minister in 2008.

Yeddyurappa has so far acknowledged that he allotted two acres in the Jigani industrial layout outside Bangalore to a company called Fluid Power Technologies which has his sons Raghavendra and Vijayendra and son-in-law Sohan Kumar as directors. The land was allotted when Yeddyurappa was the deputy chief minister under H D Kumaraswamy,during the days of the JDS-BJP coalition between February 2006 and September 2007. The land was allotted on June 2,2007 barely 15 days after the company was incorporated.

He has also acknowledged giving his daughter Umadevi two acres to set up a BPO around 55 km from Bangalore as well as allotting a residential site in the upmarket Raj Mahal Vilas extension under an MPs quota to his MP son Raghavendra.