Prabhakar Rao Skips Ed Questioning Admitted To Aiims

Prabhakar Rao, son of former Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao, failed to appear before the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for his questioning and has been admitted to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) for treatment.

He had earlier been served with a notice by the ED to appear for interrogation in connection with his alleged association with the NFL-urea scam. Earlier this month, he had cited his fathers illness as the reason why he could not appear before the officials.

ED will now have to serve notices on Prabhakar Rao again to ensure that he turns up for interrogation.

ED has already managed to establish that part of the slush money, allegedly received as kickbacks for the 200,000 tonnes NFL contract, had been routed to India via the hawala route from Dubai. It had come in the form of 50 per cent equity of an Australian firm in a joint venture with a Hyderabad based company.

According to the investigations carried out so far, while part of the kickbacks, $200,000, had been paid into the New York account of Rea Brothers, another part was paid into the Dubai account of Edible Foodstuff Ltd. The New York part of the payoffs, at the rate of one dollar per tonne of the 200,000 tonne contract, is believed to have been pocketed by Prakash Chandra, son of former fertiliser minister Ram Lakhan Singh Yadav.

It is also suspected that the Dubai part of the payoffs found its way, partly through the hawala route, into the pockets of Prabhakar Rao and Anand Mohan, son of A V R Krishnamurthy, a former official in the Prime Ministers office during Narasimha Raos tenure.

Among those arrested by the ED during its course of investigations in this case include Prakash Chandra, Anand Mohan, the Indian representative of Karsan Ltd Sambasiva Rao and another relative of Narasimha Rao, Sanjeeva Rao.