NCB gets custody of Kerala EX-CPM leader’s son
TRIVANDRUM: Bineesh Kodiyeri, the son of Communist Party of India (Marxist) politburo member Kodiyeri Balakrishnan, has landed in Narcotics Control Bureau ( NCB) custody.
Enforcement Directorate (ED) sleuths probing economic offences, who arrested him, had told a court in Bangalore that he not only funded its trade but used to do drugs.
The ED had early this month raided Balakrishnan’s home in the city, owned by Kodiyeri ater his arrest.
It says that its investigation found that he was engaged in trafficking of illicit narcotics and synthetic drugs and was the ringleader having a network of drug peddlers.
Balakrishnan had last week quit as the party’s secretary in Kerala as the son continued to languish in the Bangalore jail as an undertrial prisoner for funding narcotics trade.
The new charges under the strict anti-drug laws make it difficult for Kodiyeri to get out of jail soon as the investigators say he extensively funded narcotics trade.
He landed in trouble ater his close associate Mohammed Anoop and Rijesh Ravindran, whom the NCB arrested in August, dropped his name.
Kodiyeri also publicly admited to having lent him money for running his “hotel business” in Karnataka capital as he was his “family friend”.
The NCB sleuths recorded his arrest at Parappana Agrahara jail on Tuesday, and the trial court allowed his custody soon.
They say he used drug money to purchase benami assets and floated two shell companies in Kochi and Bangalore with the drug-peddling duo as directors.
M Sivasankar, the suspended principal secretary of Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, had allegedly transferred Rs51,736,600 to Anoop’s bank accounts between 2012 and 2019 to support drug peddling in Bangalore, they claimed.
“On verification of bank accounts of Bineesh Kodiyeri, huge amounts of cash were seen deposited in his accounts especially IDBI Bank and HDFC,” the ED report says.
“Kodiyeri has not given any satisfactory reply about the source of such huge cash deposits.”
The ruling coalition led by the CPM which is in the middle of a campaign for next month’s civic polls alleges that the arrests were politically motivated.
Vijayan has already been facing the heat of a gold smuggling and money laundering case involving his office with the state elections just four months away.
Besides ED, counter-terror National Investigation Agency (NIA), Customs and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) are looking into different angles of the scam.