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Did Vincent George make millions?

Onkar Singh in New Delhi

Vincent George, the all-powerful personal secretary to the Congress chief Sonia Gandhi, is under investigations by the Central Bureau of Investigations for amassing wealth disproportionate to his known sources of income.

Estimates about the value of his assets vary between Rs 500 million and 1 billion. These assets - most of it real estate - were allegedly acquired when George was personal secretary to former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi.

Though a special investigating team under Deputy Inspector General Arun Kumar Gupta has been constituted to prepare a report on the properties acquired by George when Rajiv Gandhi was the prime minister, agency officials are tight-lipped about any progress in the case.

George first came under cloud when Abhishek Verma, son of Rajya Sabha member Veena Verma, disclosed during his interrogation that he along with George and Ashok Aggarwal, former deputy director in the Enforcement Directorate, had made millions in several illegal deals.

Verma and Aggarwal were arrested by the CBI for framing a Karol Bagh-based businessman in a false case.

Rumour mills, meanwhile, are working overtime churning out juicy details of George's wealth. ''All the shops that you see opposite 7, Jantar Mantar belong to him. And he gets a regular income of Rs 50,000 a month from each of these shops," said one such source.

A senior income tax official who met George last week confirmed that he (George) does have some properties under his name. "I would not say whether the properties mentioned in a news report are in his name or not. But he did tell me that he has some properties which were all legally acquired," the official said.

Asked if George had declared Rs 30 million under the income tax amnesty scheme in 1991-92, the official said that such information was confidential. "May be he did take advantage of the scheme. But it could not be anywhere near the figure you just mentioned."

The official, who claimed to know George well, refused to say anything about his foreign exchange dealings. According to media reports George had remitted large sums through drafts drawn from banks in the United States. Most of these drafts came from State Bank India's Flushing branch in New York.

According to some newspaper reports George has three properties in his and his wife's name -one on the M G Road in Bangalore and two in South Delhi.

Senior Congress leaders, for reasons not too far to see, are guarded in their response to the allegations against madam's secretary.

"Try some other source. I have not the faintest of clue about what he has been doing," a Congress leader told this correspondent.

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