T’gana poaching drama: Three booked for bribery, criminal conspiracy

Hyderabad: Cyberabad police have registered a case against three men arrested from a farmhouse near Hyderabad while trying to lure four MLAs of the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) with offers of huge sums of cash, important positions and contracts.

The arrests were made on Wednesday.

On a complaint by one of the MLAs Pilot Rohit Reddy, police registered an FIR against Ramachandra Bharati alias Satish Sharma of Delhi, Nanda Kumar of Hyderabad and Simhayaji Swamy of Tirupati.

The case has been registered under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) sections 120 B (criminal conspiracy), 171-B (bribery) read with 171-E (punishment of bribery), 506 (punishment for criminal intimidation) read with 34 (acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) and section 8 of Prevention of Corruption Act.

According to the complainant, Ramachandra Bharati and Nanda Kumar belonging to the BJP met him and negotiated with him not to contest as candidate from the TRS and to join BJP by resigning from the TRS and to contest in the next elections from the BJP for which they offered him an amount of Rs 100 crore. They also offered to give central government civil contract works and other high central government positions for monetary benefits and lured him to join the BJP.

The MLA told police that they stated that if he does not join the BJP, there will be criminal cases and raids by ED/CBI and the Telangana government led by TRS will be toppled by them. Since the inducement of bribe of a political party is unethical, undemocratic and encourages corruption and polluting the politics, he decided not to entertain such unethical practice by the above persons, says the FIR.

On October 26, the two accused again contacted Rohit Reddy and informed him that they are coming to his farm house at Aziz Nagar, Moinabad in the afternoon for negotiations. They also asked him to mobilise some other TRS MLAs for offering them bribes of Rs 50 crore each to join the BJP. They also further induced him and other MLAs to receive amounts and to discharge their public duties improperly and dishonestly so that the TRS government is destabilised. They informed that three persons — Ramachandra Bharati, Nanda Kumar and Simhayaji Swamy — would come to the farmhouse to finalise the deal of joining the BJP by resigning from the TRS.

On a tip-off by Rohit Reddy, Cyberabad police reached the farmhouse and arrested the three accused.

The trio were being questioned by the police at an undisclosed location. They will be produced in a court later in the day.