Home Minister Kodiyeri Balakrishnan announced in the state Assembly that the Government has now decided to file a case against K Venugopal, Deputy General Manager of Desabhimani whom the party was forced to expel last week. Venugopal had reportedly wangled Rs 1 crore from the owner of a huge finance company facing cases of cheating the public and violating RBI guidelines, promising to get the Left Government to get him off the legal hook.

The man had gone on to complain to Chief Minister V S Achuthanandan and the party state committee after nothing appeared to be happening. CPI(M) sources say Venugopal’s hasty expulsion from the party came just as V S was about to have the complaint probed.

Venugopal is an acolyte of CPI(M) state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan,

and the Opposition has been demanding a full fledged probe alleging that he had picked

up the bribe on behalf of top party leaders.

Incidentally, the Home Minister’s announcement today comes after CPI(M) national General Secretary Prakash Karat penned an article in the Desabhimani on Tuesday, mentioning how the bribe issue had badly hurt the party. The Government has also got the police to issue a notice to another finance company floated by the kin of the earlier one’s owner, set up on the same lines.

The CPI(M) has already announced that it would return the Rs 2 crore that Desabhimani was exposed to have taken from Santiago Martin, a lottery king on the run now and accused of evading tax worth several hundred crores. This was after Desabhimani initially claimed the amount was taken from Martin’s two sons as a bond, and when that failed to stand, insisted it was really a “deposit” after it transpired that it could not legally issue bonds.

Prakash Karat said in his article that the party mouthpiece could mobilise special investment, and not bonds, “though the term bond was widely used” for such capital mobilisation.

“But when the party cadre and the public raised suspicions about money given by such a tainted individual, the state committee decided to pay back the money...,” says Karat, who had intervened after the Kerala leadership refused to acknowledge anything was wrong.