Senior Bharatiya Janata Party leader Subramanian Swamy on Monday accused former Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s son Karti Chidambaram of holding 21 secret foreign bank accounts. Seeking Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s intervention in the matter, Swamy alleged that no agency was taking any action against Karti Chidambaram because of pressure exerted by his “friends in the Finance Ministry”, The Indian Express reported.

“It is shocking that the Central Bureau of Investigation and the Enforcement Directorate...have failed to proceed against Mr Karti Chidambaram,” Swamy said in a press note. “Karti [Chidambaram] has also refused to obey three summon orders of the Enforcement Directorate,” he alleged. The BJP leader said the accounts in question were not declared to the Income Tax Department and were being held in several foreign banks, including Barclays Bank in Monaco, Standard Chartered Bank in Singapore and HSBC in the United Kingdom.

Advertisement

“He has amassed around Rs 6 lakh crore in these accounts. There is a total of around Rs 120 lakh crore stored abroad,” Swamy said, according to The Hindu. He added that Karti Chidambaram was paid bribes by a Malaysian company which purchased 100% of telecommunications company Aircel. “The Maran brothers were put forward as culprits, but the real culprit was Mr Chidambaram,” Swamy said. Karti Chidambaram, a Congress politician, refuted the allegations, saying that his tax filings were “up to date [a]n[d] completely in compliance with regulatory/statutory requirements”.

Swamy, who has made similar allegations in the past, was asked by the Supreme Court on February 10 to submit evidence within two weeks to prove P Chidambaram’s involvement in the Aircel-Maxis case. The bench asked the senior leader to prove credible material to back his allegation that the Congress leader deliberately granted Foreign Investment Promotion Board clearance to the Rs 3,500-crore deal in 2006 when he was the finance minister.