Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad
The BJP on Wednesday trained its guns again on the Congress and former finance minister P Chidambaram over the 80:20 gold import scheme, asking why trading houses, including the beleaguered Gitanjali Gems, were allowed to import gold just a day before the 2014 Lok Sabha results were to be announced.
At a press conference at the party headquarters, Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad countered Congress leader Anand Sharma’s allegation that the BJP’s attack on Chidambaram was not backed by facts. Prasad shared a purported office memorandum of the Finance Ministry dated May 15, 2014. In the memorandum, the premier and start trading houses were allowed to import gold. “…was it a price, was it a consideration, was it pressure or was it an obligation. What was it that Mr Chidambaram, a well- informed politician, took this decision one day before the results were to come,” he alleged.
According to Prasad, the nature of pressure or price could be assessed from the fact that in a single day the file traveled with “supersonic speed through nine desks after his signature” and it was followed by the office memorandum. He said Chidambaram knew the Constitution and “any person having the slightest consideration of democratic integrity, propriety and sanity of democratic polity would never do this”.
In August 2013, the then UPA government had introduced the 80:20 rule, which allowed traders to import gold only after they had exported 20 per cent of gold from their previous import. The rule was scrapped in November 2014 after the NDA came to power.
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