Speaker to be interrogated for role in smuggling, hawala

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM (Jan 10 HS) :Kerala will soon see the ignominy of the presiding officer of its Legislative Assembly, P Sreeramakrishnan, being interrogated by the officers of the Customs Department in connection with the gold smuggling scam and hawala transactions under the guise of diplomatic baggage.

The Customs Department at Thiruvananthapuram was told by the assistant solicitor general that there was no laws which prevented its investigating officers from interrogating the Speaker who has been named by the kingpins of smuggling Swapna Suresh, Sarath and Sandeep Nair. The ASG had asked the officials to take up the questioning only after the session of the House concludes. “This is not to upset the plans of the Government of Kerala to complete the session in time,” said a member of the investigating team.

Iyyappan Nair, the assistant personal secretary to the Speaker was grilled for nearly nine hours by the Customs officials last week. Though there was no official  release about what transpired in the question-answer session, sources in the Customs office said that Nair had ‘spilled a lot of beans’ and that is why the officials chose to summon Sreeramakrishnan.

The Speaker, upset over the possibility of him being grilled,  had said that since his was a Constitutional post, the Customs Department should seek his permission before summoning him for questioning. He had also said that even his staff could be questioned only with his permission. But the Customs officers chose to ignore Sreeramakrishnan’s challenge and summoned Nair, the Speaker’s conscience keeper.

A school drop out, Nair joined Sreeramakrishnan’s office as an attender and rose to become the assistant personal secretary by his ‘hard work’. The scion from Perinthamanna would become the first Speaker in Kerala history to be questioned for gold smuggling and hawala transactions. Though it is too early to comment on the possibilities of his involvement in these operations, the precedents of Sreeramakrishnan are against him. Hailing from a feudal family in Perinthalmanna, Sreeramakrishnan is a multi-millionaire. But he threw norms to the winds and got fashionable spectacles costing more than Rs 50,000 with Government funds. “I want to get a panoramic view of the legislative assembly while I am presiding over th House,” he is reported to have told his rivals when questioned about the propriety of him making use of government funds for buying fashionable spectacles.