DMK Welcome SC Verdict On TASMAC Raids

Chennai: Welcoming the Supreme Court hauling up the Enforcement Directorate (ED) for crossing its limits in raiding the office of Tamil Nadu State Marketing Corporation (TASMAC) and the houses of its honchos, the DMK said the BJP’s bid to besmirch the reputation of the DMK government had boomeranged on it and that the court itself had mentioned that the raids went against State’s autonomy.

Organisation Secretary of DMK R S Bharathi and Legal wing secretary N R Elango met media persons separately at Anna Arivalayam on Thursday and pointed to the Union BJP government misusing the enforcement agencies under its control to intimidate non-BJP governments in the country and show the leaders of those parties in a bad light.

Bharathi referred to two cases in which ED officials had been caught for graft and said that it had functioned like a blackmail organisation. One incident of graft was in Kerala where it got exposed while taking a bribe of Rs 2 crore and the other was in Tamil Nadu where ED officials blackmailed a doctor to extort money from him.

With just seven months left for the Assembly elections, the BJP was trying all tricks under its hat to earn a bad name for the DMK government by covering up the fact that a slew of cases were pending against TASMAC employees for quite some time and trying to put the entire blame on the DMK, Bharathi said.

For conducting the latest raid on TASMAC, the ED had fallen back on a slew of cases pending since 2014, of which 39 cases were registered during the AIADMK rule and only 7 after the DMK came to power, Elango clarified and acknowledged the Supreme Court seeing the raids on the TASMAC office as a move that went against State autonomy.

Instead of acting against the TASMAC employees facing the cases, the ED had clubbed them together to create a reason for the raid, he said and pointed to the court alleging that the ED had violated provisions of the Constitution and gone against several laws by misusing legal provisions.

The Supreme Court had rightly pointed out that the ED had used unfair means to raid the houses of TASMAC officials and its actions were only political vendetta that went against federalism, he said.

The Supreme Court had now accepted what the Tamil Nadu government had been saying about the ED all along, accusing it of political vendetta and going against the spirit of State autonomy, he said. Also he mentioned about the BJP unleashing the ED on political leaders in other States to intimidate them with grave charges and then withdrawing all the cases once they aligned with the national party.