CBI chargesheets Karti Chidambaram in Chinese workers’ visa corruption case

PTI New Delhi: The CBI has filed a charge sheet against Congress MP Karti Chidambaram and others in connection with alleged bribery in facilitating visas of Chinese nationals for a power company in 2011 when his father P Chidambaram was the Union home minister, officials said on Thursday. In its charge sheet submitted before a special court here, the CBI has named Karti Chidambaram, the Lok Sabha MP from Sivaganga, his alleged close associate S Bhaskararaman, company Talawandi Sabo Power Ltd (TSPL), a subsidiary of Vedanta and Mumbaibased Bell Tools, through which bribes were allegedly routed, they said. The CBI has filed the charge sheet af ter two years of probe into its FIR registered in 2022 where it had alleged that the Punjab-based TSPL was setting up a 1980 MW thermal power plant and the work was outsourced to a Chinese company Shandong Electric Power Construction Corp (SEPCO).

The project was running behind its schedule and the company was allegedly facing prospects of penalty. "In order to avoid penal actions for the delay, the said private company (TSPL) of Mansa was trying to bring more and more Chinese persons and professionals for their site at district Mansa (Punjab) and needed project visas over and above the ceiling imposed by the Ministry of Home Affairs," the CBI said in a statement in 2022. The CBI FIR alleged that an executive of TSPL approached Karti Chidambaram through his "close associate" Bhaskararaman. "They devised a back-door way to defeat the purpose of the ceiling by granting permission to re-use 263 project visas allotted to the said Chinese company's officials," the agency had said.