The Enforcement Directorate (ED) is learnt to be preparing to register a money laundering case against Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan’s daughter T Veena.
The central agency initiated a probe into an alleged illegal payment scandal involving Veena in March 2024 following a complaint from Shone George, a member of the Kottayam district panchayat and son of senior politician P C George, who recently joined the BJP. Shone moved the ED seeking a probe into Veena’s Information Technology (IT) firm Exalogic Solutions Private Limited.
Veena has been under the scanner of various central agencies since a 2023 Income-Tax (I-T) Department report on the Kochi-based Cochin Minerals and Rutile Limited (CMRL) said the firm allegedly made “illegal payment” of Rs 1.72 crore to Exalogic for three years starting in 2018-19 even though the latter did not provide it any service.
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Veena has been in the eye of the storm since her days in engineering college, being drawn into political conversations in Kerala. Vijayan’s opponents targeted him when Veena was studying in a private engineering college in Tamil Nadu in the early 2000s, pointing to the CPI(M)’s opposition to self-financing private colleges in Kerala in those days.
After college, Veena worked in technology company Oracle for a few years before moving on to join R P Techsoft International as the CEO in Thiruvananthapuram in 2012. It is an IT venture of Middle East-based R P Group that is promoted by billionaire Ravi Pillai. After stepping down from R P Techsoft, she founded Exalogic in 2014. Her choice to set it up in Bengaluru caught the attention of the CPI(M)’s rivals who pointed out the Left’s attempts to promote Kerala as a major IT destination.
She is the sole director of Exalogic, whose paid-up capital is Rs 1 lakh and has been engaged in the software and consultancy services. It is currently, however, a “dormant” company. In 2020, Swapna Suresh, a key accused in the 2020 gold smuggling scandal, alleged that Veena was the “mastermind” behind a controversial deal that allowed the US-based firm Sprinklr to collate health data of people in Kerala under Covid quarantine without taking their consent.
The Congress, subsequently, attempted to link Veena with Suresh. During a debate on the gold smuggling case in the state Assembly in June 2022, the Congress alleged that Jaik Balakumar, a PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) director at the time, was Veena’s “mentor” and PwC hired Suresh as a consultant for the Space Park project of the Kerala government’s Information Technology Department after she quit the UAE Consulate as its executive secretary in 2019.
I-T probe against Veena
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As per the I-T department’s 2023 report, CMRL entered into a service level agreement with Exalogic in 2017 for the development and management of software with a monthly remuneration of Rs 3 lakh. Another document, which the I-T personnel recovered during the raid, purportedly indicated that CMRL engaged Veena as its IT and marketing consultant on a retaining basis from 2017 for a monthly remuneration of Rs 5 lakh.
Following the CMRL payoff row involving Veena, the Congress sought to rake up another controversy, alleging that this payment did not reflect in the election affidavit of her husband Mohamed Riyas, a CPI(M) leader and Minister for Public Works, when he contested from the Beypore Assembly constituency in the 2021 Assembly polls.
Riyas’s affidavit on the Election Commission (EC) website shows Veena’s income in 2016-17 as Rs 8,25,708, which grew to Rs 10,42,864 in 2017-18 and to Rs 29,94,521 in 2020-21. Consultancy is mentioned as her source of income. The market value of Veena’s self-acquired assets is Rs 1.28 crore. Riyas did not have any source of income from 2017-18 to 2020-21.
