Swapna Suresh had sought the help of M Sivasankar, the former Principal Secretary, to smuggle large amounts of foreign currencies out of the country before her role in the alleged gold smuggling with suspected terror links came to light, investigating agencies have found.
Swapna had sought Sivasankar’s help to secure tickets for five “foreigners” on Vande Bharat flights to Dubai in June.
Sivasankar, in turn, got in touch with the airline concerned directly. He told the company that Swapna would call from the UAE Consulate and that it should help her, sources said.
In June, Swapna was employed with the Space Park under Sivasankar, who was also the principal secretary of the state IT department, and she had resigned from the consulate long ago.
Sivasankar, who was aware of this, could not explain why he introduced Swapna to the airline as an official at the consulate.
Smuggling via Vande Bharat mission
Investigators stumbled upon Sivasankar’s role while looking into information they had received that Swapna had used Vande Bharat services during the COVID lockdown to smuggle foreign currency collected in India.
According to Sivasankar, Swapna got in touch with him to help UAE nationals stranded in Kerala due to the lockdown return home.
Investigators have, however, found that the five people whom Swapna had sent along with eight baggages on the Vande Bharat flights carrying Malayalees were not UAE nationals. They also feel there is also something amiss in the manner the baggages suspected to have contained the foreign currencies were screened before the flights.
More details are likely to come out during the interrogations of the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which has launched an investigation into black money transactions carried out as part of the gold smuggling. The ED does not believe that Swapna collected foreign currencies only for gold smuggling. It expects to obtain more details during the questioning of those who had helped Swapna collect the foreign currencies.
Corridor of power
The two rounds of interrogation of former principal secretary M Sivasankar by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) have shed more light on the influence Swapna Suresh wielded in the ‘corridor of power’.
The ED, which questioned Sivasankar for the second time on August 15, has obtained evidence of the sway Swapna held over authorities much before she got involved in the racket to smuggle gold through diplomatic baggage.
It has been found that the bank locker in Swapna’s and Sivasankar’s chartered accountant’s names was opened as per the directions of the former principal secretary in November 2018.
In her statement to the investigators, Swapna had said that the Rs 1 crore found in the locker was the commission amount received under the Life Mission project.
The smuggling of gold through diplomatic parcels started in July 2019.
The chartered accountant has handed over to the investigation team all the information, along with documents, about the money and gold found in the bank locker. He has also provided details of when they were bought and sold.
Swapna had said in her statement that the key to the locker was in the custody of the chartered accountant.
The chartered accountant got suspicious about Swapna’s financial dealings and informed Sivasankar about it. But the suspended bureaucrat did not tell him to end the joint bank transactions.
The chartered accountant then started maintaining the records of all the transactions made for Swapna. Sivasankar could not give clear answers to the question posed to him based on these records.
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