ED arrests Deccan Chronicle’s T Venkattram Reddy, 2 others in loan default case
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) on Wednesday arrested T Venkattram Reddy, former chairman, and promoter of Deccan Chronicle Holdings Limited (DCHL), along with the company’s former director P K Iyer and auditor Mani Oomen. The Andhra-based group is publishing English newspapers Deccan Chronicle, Asian Age, Financial Chronicle, and Telugu newspaper Andhra Bhoomi. The ED charged has alleged that Reddy and others were involved in money laundering and defrauded banks more than Rs.8,000 crore by submitting fake documents.
Venkattram Reddy (53) was taken into custody under the Prevention of Money Laundering (PMLA) by the federal agency’s Hyderabad office, said ED officials. The agency had said in 2020 that its probe found that “the three promoters of DCHL namely P K Iyer, T Venkatram Reddy and T Vinayakravi Reddy hatched a well planned conspiracy and manipulated the balance sheets of the company inflating the profits-advertisement revenue and grossly under-stated the financial liabilities of the company to paint a rosy picture for years to cheat the banks and its shareholders.”
The company, at that time, was stated to be under corporate insolvency resolution process. A resolution plan for only Rs.400 crore has been approved by the NCLT. The total loan fraud committed by DCHL and its promoters is estimated to be at Rs.8,180 crore, the agency had said. The ED filed a PMLA case against the firm and its promoters in 2015 after studying a CBI FIR registered to investigate the alleged bank loan default.[1]
Venkattram Reddy was earlier arrested by CBI for bank loan frauds. Reddy was also arrested by Delhi Police in 2015 for attempting to murder a whistleblower of his financial frauds.[2]
After his father, T Chandrashekar Reddy, who was a member of Congress and a Rajya Sabha member from 1981 to 1993, passed away, Venkattram Reddy became the chairman and editor-in-chief of Deccan Chronicle. He subsequently served the remaining two years of his father’s term as Rajya Sabha MP, but was not renominated by the Congress, after which he quit politics. He was also the first owner of the former Indian Premier League (IPL) team, Deccan Chargers.
The ED arrested him for his involvement in money laundering in the case of loans taken from Canara Bank. The agency has stated that Reddy misused Canara Bank’s short-term corporate loans for personal use and diverted the money to other purposes than mentioned. The loans were taken for investment in DCHL but they were diverted to other business ventures such as the IPL franchise, Odyssey chain of bookstores, and chartered airlines. The ED and the CBI also accused Reddy of using loans to purchase luxury cars and maintain his flamboyant life. These expenditures and money siphoning led to huge financial losses for DCHL and it defaulted on returning its loans for the first time in early 2013.
Reference:
[1] Deccan Chronicle and Asian Age newspapers shutting shop? Huge debt keeping buyers away? – Dec 29, 2019, PGurus.com
[2] Delhi Police arrest media baron Venkattram Reddy on charges of assault – May 03, 2015, HT
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