Former BJP minister and Bellary mining baron Gali Janardhana Reddy on Saturday made a dramatic appearance before Bangalore police in connection with a bribery case after uploading a video claiming he had never absconded.
At 10pm, nearly six hours after Reddy entered the crime branch office, he was still inside.
Police had been looking for Reddy for the past three days over an allegation that he bribed an Enforcement Directorate (ED) official to help a financier accused of duping investors of Rs 200 crore. The financier has since been arrested.
Reddy has denied that he had absconded. “I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry when I saw all those TV channels reporting that I have absconded. I was very much in Bangalore,” he says in the video uploaded on YouTube.
“I got the notice yesterday (Friday) asking me to appear before them (the police) on Sunday. But I thought I’ll appear today itself.”
But he did not reveal his place of residence during the past three days as his apartment was found locked by the police. Earlier this week, the Congress had snatched the Bellary Lok Sabha seat from the BJP.
The original case was registered by Karnataka police, which report to the state government run by the JDS-Congress alliance, and was later handed over to the income tax department and the ED, which function under the Union finance ministry.
The allegation is that Reddy had tried to help Syed Ahmed Fareed, the managing director of non-banking finance company Ambidant Marketing, when the businessman faced action from the ED. Reddy has said “these allegations are far from the truth”.
An ED media statement issued on Friday had not named Reddy and focused entirely on alleging how Fareed had conned his investors.
Reddy said in the video that neither did the police send him a notice nor was he named in the FIR.
“When I heard all these stories about me, I told my lawyer that we needed to meet the police. But he asked me what was the point in just going and meeting them when there wasn’t even a notice or any booking in the FIR,” he said.
His lawyer Chandrashekar drove Reddy to the crime branch office around 4.15pm.
