PIONEER NEWS SERVICE | Dehradun
Senior Congress leader Udit Raj said that the Congress will expose the politics of lies and vendetta in the National Herald case. He said that the case is a desperate attempt by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party to divert the attention of the people from the real issues and to insult the national heritage.
Addressing the media at the State headquarters of the Congress here on Tuesday, Raj alleged the chargesheet filed by the Enforcement Directorate is a political conspiracy. He said that it is unfortunate that the accusations of money laundering have been made in such a case where a transaction of not even a single paisa was made. It is normal practice to convert debt into equity to make the balances sheet debt free.
He said that the National Herald was founded under Associated Journals Limited (AJL) company in 1937 by PD Tandon, Acharya Narendra Dev and RA Kidwai along with Jawahar Lal Nehru. The British felt threatened by the newspaper due to which they banned it from 1942 to 1945. The AJL has immovable assets in six cities- Delhi, Panchkula, Mumbai, Lucknow, Patna and Indore but these properties, barring Lucknow, are under lease. Raj said that the Congress party gave a loan of Rs 90 crore in 100 small installments from 2002 to 2011 for payment of salaries of the employees because of the poor financial condition of the newspaper. He said that the Congress supported National Herald as it believes that it is an organisation which represents the ideology of the party. In order to revive the AJL, it was restructured in 2010 and Young Indian was constituted as a non-profit earning company. The then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, late Motilal Vohra, late Oscar Fernandez and Rahul Gandhi were the shareholders while Sam Pitroda and Suman Dubey were not shareholder directors. The debt of Rs 90 crore of the AJL was converted into equity in view of its poor financial condition.
The Congress leader said that the claim of BJP that AJL the total value of AJL is Rs 5,000 crore is a bundle of lies and the fact is that the Income Tax department has valued the properties of AJL at Rs 413 crore.
