Patil vs Patil: JSW owes huge dues, drop land deal

Bengaluru: Senior Congress leader H.K. Patil on Saturday shot off  a strongly worded letter to home minister, M. B. Patil ,who heads the cabinet sub-committee on the proposed sale of land to JSW Steel in Ballari, questioning the propriety of even considering the deal when huge dues were pending from the company.

Signalling that he was unwilling to relent on the issue, which he had raised almost a month ago, Mr Patil in his three-page letter said that selling the land at a throwaway price to JSW was a cause for concern and contended that any land allotment to corporate houses should be governed by the industrial policy, the Transparency Act and the mines and minerals policies of the Union and state governments.

Besides, any big allotments of land must be made only on need-based and sensitive consideration of all the important parameters.

Listing out his objections to the sale of land to JSW, Mr Patil said it owed the state-owned Mysore Minerals Ltd Rs 2,000 crore and the Special Investigation Team (SIT) of the Karnataka Lok Ayukta had registered an FIR against it on November 19, 2014 for cheating the state government.

The report of the Lok Ayukta on illegal mining too had detailed how the company had caused a loss of Rs 324 crore to the state exchequer, he noted.

The Congress leader alleged that JSW Steel had bought overloaded ore from illegal miners in 2009-10 and the industries department had issued a notification that the mineral deposits on the land proposed to be sold to the company belonged to pattadars of the patta landholders.

“If this sale deed is executed, it will become a patta land of the Jindal company and the state will lose all it rights to the mineral deposits on it,” he warned.

With the budget session of the state Legislature scheduled to commence from July 12, the JSW land issue and the mega fraud by IMA founder Mohammad Mansoor Khan are expected to figure prominently in both houses of the Legislature.