Singareni Contracts: Harish welcomes Bhatti Offer For Probe, Says It Must Include CM's Role

HYDERABAD: Senior BRS leader T. Harish Rao on Saturday said he accepted Deputy Chief Minister Mallu Bhatti Vikramarka’s offer for a probe into affairs of the Singareni Collieries Company Limited (SCCL) provided the “Deputy CM assures that the probe will be impartial and will also examine the role of Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy, and his brother in law in the tenders scam which the BRS has exposed.”

In his statement that followed Bhatti’s press meet on allegations levelled by the BRS on Singareni affairs, Harish Rao asked why the Deputy Chief Minister had skipped addressing the scams with respect to pricing and awarding of contracts for solar power projects by SCCL.

“The Deputy Chief Minister beat around the bush without addressing our allegations on scams in Singareni by trying to obfuscate the issues. If there was no scam, why was the Naini coal block tendering process cancelled? Was this not done because we exposed how Revanth’s brother-in-law is the beneficiary? Just because one tender is cancelled, a scam suddenly does not become a scheme,” Harish Rao said.

He thanked Bhatti for citing a list of site visit certification mandates from across the country and for saying that SCCL was only following the same practice. “He agreed that our allegation of mandatory site visit certification is the truth. Now that this was done, all the other contracts too must be cancelled,” he said.