Opposition leader Ramesh Chennithala said on Sunday that the government's decision to award the consultancy of the Rs 4500-crore e-mobility project to the multinational firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) without inviting tenders smacked of corruption and demanded the immediate scrapping of the deal.
The plan is to purchase 3000 electric buses for Rs 4500 crore under the e-mobility project.
At a press conference in Thiruvananthapuram, Chennithala said PwC was asked to prepare the detailed project report (DPC) flouting all established norms.
Moreover, Chennithala said PwC was blacklisted by Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) on March 31, 2018. The government order granting the contract to prepare the DPR was issued on November 7, 2019, when the SEBI ban was in force.
Chennithala said the London-based firm was facing nine legal cases in India alone and that it had suffered a serious dent to its reputation for its role in the Satyam scam, its clean chit to the United Breweries when Vijay Mallya was the owner, and also its role in the Nokia tax fraud case.
Chennithala said the Pinarayi Vijayan government was also adequately warned about the audit firm. He said Justice A P Shah, the 20th Law Commission chairman and former Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court, and his Whistleblowers' Forum had levelled serious charges against PwC in 2017.
"Shah even wrote to the Chief Minister in 2017 asking him to drop PwC as the consultant of the Kochi-Palakkad Industrial Corridor and K-FON (Kerala-Fibre Optic Network) projects. Noted lawyer Prasanth Bhushan had even tweeted about Shah's letter to the Chief Minister. But now the Chief Minister has gone ahead and awarded the third project to PwC," Chennithala said.
“And this time, the procedures followed in the earlier instances have been avoided,” he added.
The opposition leader alleged that the Chief Minister had a direct role in awarding the contract to PwC. "The decision to grant the DPR work to PwC was taken at a meeting chaired by the Chief Minister. And an order was issued soon after. Fact is, the government has no right to issue such an order violating all existing rules," Chennithala said.
Chennithala's posers
The opposition leader then hurled a set of questions to Chief Minister.
One, why is a communist Chief Minister so interested in a company that exemplifies all that is bad about capitalism? "He has to come clean on his bond with PwC," Chennithala said.
Two, was the transport minister kept in the loop when PwC was chosen. Normally, the demand for consultancy and the DPR should have originated in the Transport Department. "I hope the transport minister, too, responds to this," Chennithala said.
Three, why did the Chief Minister involve himself directly to grant the award to a company blacklisted by the SEBI, and that too with such unholy haste?
Four, what was the legal basis on which PwC was granted the consultancy.
Five, has any action been taken by the Chief Minister on the letter sent to him by former Delhi High Court Chief Justice A P Shah?
Transport minister confused by allegation
Responding to Chennithala's charge, transport minister A K Saseendran said the Chief Minister had not asked him to grant contract to any specific firm. The minister, however, seemed under the impression that Chennithala's charge was about some deal struck during the pandemic. "The Transport Department had no entered into any deal during the COVID phase," Saseendran told reporters in Kozhikode.
When he was told the PwC contract was given in 2019, Saseendran said he would have to refer official files. "E-mobility project has already been approved by the government. I am not clear what the opposition leader has in mind," the minister said.
Nonetheless, he said he had not held talks with any company. "I also don't think the Chief Minister would have taken an arbitrary decision related to a project like this," he said.
