Arun Jaitley on Subramanian Swamy’s charges: Did Congress give loan to a private company?

Shimla: The BJP today hit out at the Gandhi family saying they should come clean on allegations made by Janata Party chief Subramanian Swamy.

Mr Swamy accused Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul of ‘a stinking deal’ where they floated a private company which then went on to illicitly acquire a public limited company which has valuable property in Uttar Pradesh and Delhi.

In a press conference in Shimla, senior leader Arun Jaitley also slammed the government’s move to put on hold a decision announced only hours before to hike the price of non-subsidised LPG cylinders by Rs. 26.50.

Here are the highlights:

On Rahul Gandhi and Subramanian Swamy:

I am not commenting on a person specific or Dr Swamy’s allegations
I want to highlight the Associated Journals board document which says AICC gave them a loan of 90 crore
Dr Swamy said political parties cannot make donations – but the consequences are far reaching
The Election Commission guidelines state that each party must amend their constitution and according to Article 8 of Election Commission’s conditions of registration that financial resources must be used only for a political purpose.
We amended the law to say any legal entity can donate to a political party and there was a tax incentive for that. I-T Act, Companies Act and Representation of People’s Act was changed – and the conditions were that anyone donating more than Rs. 20,000 has to be listed and declared. After political parties comply with this, they are exempted from paying tax
If it is true that money was accumulated in the name of a political party and both donor and party got exempted – and then that was transferred to a political entity

On Sonia’s statement on corruption:

Congress is led by a corrupt man in Himachal – don’t think this was the best place to make the statement

On LPG price hike, rollback:

Besides being unfair and anti-people it added to the misery of the common man and women especially
Only at midnight they realised it was a politically costly move
And even then they did not rollback – I think this will last for 72 hours
After Himachal votes, the holding out operation would have ended
The people of Himachal should decide that we’ll give them a crushing defeat
That might stem such eagerness to bring anti-people moves

On VBS files:

The issues that I raised at my earlier press conference have not been answered
Why should he benefit on policies with money from someone else’s account? He must answer… that I-T cannot answer.
Truth and public good are complete defence in a defamation case.