SC rejects Kalyan Rao plea to stall trial in 300cr fraud

Hyderabad: The Supreme Court has refused to stall the trial in a Enforcement Directorate (ED) case in Chennai special court against K Srinivas Kalyan Rao and 14 others facing charges of duping a consortium of public sector banks after taking loans of 300 crore.
The ED case has also named BJP MLA Y Sujana Chowdary and his Chennai-based Best and Crompton Engineering Projects company as accused. Kalyan Rao is the son of the late CBI director and BRS leader K Vijayarama Rao.
Kalyan Rao in his petition before the apex court said that the Chennai special court had no jurisdiction to hear the ED case and wanted the court to scrap it. A bench of Justice J K Maheshwari and Justice Aravinda Kumar said that it was not inclined to entertain the appeal, but extended the interim protection granted earlier for four weeks. The bench said the petitioner can avail statutory remedies available to him under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act.
The others named in the ED complaint are B Narayana Swamy, Bellary Murali, Meka Ramakrishna Varma, Ch Jawahar Babu, Pathan Apser Hussain, Mahal Hotel belonging to Srinivas Rao, Viceroy Hotels, its MD P Prabhakar Reddy, Tejaswini Engineering, Godavari Exports and Imports, Ganga Exim and Global Forgings.
Earlier, CBI charge sheet in the case said that Best & Crompton, its directors and officials availed letter of credit facility from banks under the pretext of undertaking govt projects. The loans so generated were directed to various shell companies and were never spent for the specified purposes.
Most of these shell companies were traced to the head office of Sujana group in Hyderabad and as many as 278 rubber seals of these shell companies were seized from there. All the shell companies were used to show circular trading and they showed some transactions with Best and Crompton too, CBI said.
CBI also said that it had seized several incriminating documents from the Jubilee Hills residence of Sujana Chowdary.