Thiruvananthapuram: Former chief minister Oommen Chandy has reiterated his readiness to face a judicial probe into the Vizhinjam agreement following the adverse remarks made by the CAG. In a Facebook post, he urged Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan to include in the terms of reference of the inquiry a comparative study of the cost- benefit and investment of the state in the present agreement and that adopted by the V.S. Achuthanandan government.
Mr Chandy posted a 2000-plus word clarification on ‘the misunderstanding created in the minds of the people by the CAG reports’ a few hours before the state cabinet decided to appoint retired judge C. N. Ramachandran Nair for the judicial probe.
He recalled that the initial development works on the Vizhinjam seaport had started in 1991. The E. K. Nayanar government in 1996 did not show any interest in the project after M. V. Raghavan during the A. K. Antony regime signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kumar Group of Malaysia. The Antony government in 2004 tried to revive the project. When Mr Chandy took over the mantle, a company named Zoom could not get security clearance as its consortium partner was a Chinese company. The UDF government in its fifth attempt revived the project.
“The fifth attempt during the last UDF government was made considering the lessons learnt from the failure of all the past four attempts,” he said. He denied the allegation that the state’s interests were sacrificed by the UDF government to favour Adani.
He also stated that the audit report of CAG pointed out that the concession period for the project could have been 30 years instead of 40. This was not done unilaterally or midway of the project to favour Adani or any other bidder. The period was adopted from the ‘Model concession agreement for state ports’ prepared by the Planning Commission.
Through a cabinet decision and vide government order dated May 12, 2014, the model agreement was adopted by the government of Kerala in 2014 for Vizhinjam port. All the bid documents including model concession agreement and its conditions were vetted by the department of economic affairs, ministry of finance, before it gave in-principle approval for the viability gap funding, he said.
