Pune: Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar`s daughter and Lok Sabha MP Supriya Sule has rubbished claims made by former police officer-turned-social activist Yogesh Pratap Singh about her being involved in a ``mega-scam`` in the controversial hill township Lavasa, near Pune in Maharashtra.
Singh had claimed that the scam, spread over 25,000 acres of land, was reportedly worth around Rs 3, 000 crores.
He had also alleged the reason the Maharashtra Government was so generous with this deal was because Pawar`s daughter Supriya and her husband Sadanand Sule held a 20 percent stake in the company that promoted this resort town.
Sule denied any wrongdoing in the deal and termed the accusations as baseless.
“These all allegations made against me and my family are completely false and completely baseless. Why are they doing this and targeting us, I don`t know? This you will have to go and ask them," said Sule.
Singh said Sule and her husband Sadanand sold their stake in the company that would later morph into the Lavasa Corporation.
The activist had said that she blatantly misreported facts because Axis Bank had evaluated the Lavasa Corporation at Rs 100 billion, as such her 10 percent stake (and another 10 percent held by her husband) would have been worth hundred crores. He described this as ``a huge money-laundering exercise``.
Sule also took a dig at anti-graft activists like YP Singh and Arvind Kejriwal by contending she had more important things to do than pay attention to such charges.
"To be honest, it has become a fashion in India to call a press conference at 5 pm in the evening and level false allegations against people.”
“Fortunately, I am a lawmaker and have work to do. People have elected me and entrusted me with a responsibility," said Sule.
Singh had also mentioned that he had conducted the investigation with activist-turned politician Arvind Kejriwal, and criticised the latter for selectively targeting Bharatiya Janata Party president Nitin Gadkari in a matter much smaller than the full scale of the scam at hand.
ANI
