Kerala gets the distillery monkey off its back

Kerala has had a long history of scams that, in one way or the other, is intertwined with liquor—bars, breweries and distilleries. In fact, it was the momentum of the bar bribery scam against the erstwhile UDF government that was instrumental, to some extent, in bringing the LDF to power in 2016.

Therefore, it was quite a puzzle why it took lightly the charges of wrongful sanctioning of licence to three breweries and a distillery. On Monday, sanity prevailed as it decided to cancel the recently granted permits. Sreedharan Brewery, Apollo Distilleries and Breweries and Power Infratech were to set up breweries in Kannur, Palakkad and Ernakulam and Sree Chakra Distillery was to set up a distillery in Thrissur.

The unseemly haste shown by the LDF government in granting the licence had triggered a barrage of allegations by the Opposition regarding outright irregularities in the licence allocation which could not be effectively countered.

The dark underbelly of the scam came to light as a TNIE probe found that the lone distillery licence was granted to a company that was deemed defunct as the Registrar of Companies (RoC) had it ‘struck off’ on account of not complying with company rules. Surely, it cannot be by chance that the Excise Department overlooked the utter lack of credentials of Sree Chakra while granting it a licence in double quick time.

Because, it does not take a financial wizard to figure out it could not have been the intent of any company with an authorised share capital of `10,000 and a paid-up capital of a meagre `600 to start a distillery. Surely, the promoters were fronting for someone.

The Pinarayi Vijayan government may have just about saved the day by getting the brewery-distillery monkey off its back in the nick of time. But it has definitely not done itself any great favours by discarding a legacy that dates back to 1999 when the then Chief Minister E K Nayanar of the CPM banned the sanctioning of new liquor units in the state, an order that subsequent governments had not dared revoke. Until now.