Mehbooba Mufti govt has failed on all fronts: Omar
Jammu: Attacking the Mehbooba Mufti led dispensation in Jammu and Kashmir, former chief minister Omar Abdullah said today that the state government had failed on all fronts and claimed that recent comments by Governor N N Vohra certified this failure.
"The government has failed on all the fronts in all the ways and that certificate (of failure) has been given to it by the Governor," the National Conference (NC) leader told reporters here.
Governor Vohra had on Monday, while delivering the 'The First Mufti Memorial Lecture' to commemorate the Mufti Sayeed Day, said that the entire polity and public services of the state, and the people must work together to protect the student community and youth.
"We have not been able to do so and I regret to say that," the governor had said.
Abdullah said that as far as welfare schemes were concerned, people would not have been on the roads if they were getting their due.
"Whether it is in Jammu or in Kashmir. People are holding protests. People are demanding their rights. People are not getting their rights," he said.
The former chief minister said that had the government undertaken development work, it would not have been forced to postpone elections in Anantnag.
On the Centre's special representative Dineshwar Sharma, Abdullah said "if he does good work, results will be before us. It will be premature to give him a certificate of his work. First we have to see what is his mission. And then we will know whether he has done right work".
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Kerala: ED files money laundering case in Sabarimala gold loss case
Thiruvananthapuram/New Delhi (PTI): The Enforcement Directorate on Friday filed a money laundering case in the Sabarimala gold loss case in Kerala, official sources said.
The federal probe agency's Kochi zonal office has registered an Enforcement Case Information Report (ECIR), an ED equivalent of a police FIR, under various sections of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), they said.
The politically sensitive case is already being investigated by a state special investigation team (SIT) under the supervision of the Kerala High Court.
In December, the high court had allowed the ED to undertake an independent investigation into the case after it dismissed objections raised by the SIT against sharing the case information with the central agency.
The SIT is probing two cases related to the gold loss incident and has arrested 11 people so far. The latest to be arrested by the SIT was Kandararu Rajeevaru, the chief priest of the Lord Ayyappa temple.
The other prominent persons arrested in the case by the SIT are Bengaluru-based businessman and prime accused Unnikrishnan Potty and former Travancore Devaswom Board president A Padmakumar.
The ED is expected to soon look for more evidence, question the accused, and it may also go on to attach certain assets of those involved if it finds that they generated "proceeds of crime", according to the officials.
The probe is related to a series of irregularities, including official misconduct, administrative lapses and a criminal conspiracy to misappropriate the gold from the various artefacts of the Lord Ayyappa shrine.
The investigation by the SIT, and now by the ED, is related to the loss of gold from the gold-cladded copper plates of the Dwarapalaka (guardian deity) idols and the door frames of the Sreekovil (sanctum sanctorum) of the temple.
The SIT has informed the High Court that its probe found "a series of serious official misconduct and administrative lapses on the part of the Devaswom officials right from the initial correspondence till the handing over of the door frame plates, connected plates, Dwarapalaka plates and pillar plates to Unnikrishnan Potty without proper authorisation".
It further said in its statement that Govardhan, Pankaj Bhandari, the CEO of Chennai-based Smart Creations, which carried out the electroplating of the artefacts from the temple, Potty and the other accused hatched a criminal conspiracy with malicious intention to misappropriate the gold cladded on the copper plates in and around the shrine.
"It is found during the investigation that all these criminal activities were part of a large conspiracy and an organised crime committed by the accused persons.
"They had a larger plan to dismantle other gold-clad items on the Sabarimala Sreekovil and to extract the gold from them for misappropriation," it said.
