Leading from the front in get-rich times
It's just not Andhra Pradesh that's milking honey out of liberalisation, as its chief minister would like the rest of the world to believe. Going by tehelka.com, so is Mr N Chandrababu Naidu himself, with a brand value of $5 billion and a net worth of Rs 2,000 crore.
Describing him as the richest politician in India, the website says Mr Naidu has business interests spreading from Bangalore to Singapore. The latest addition to his growing empire is the Global Trust Bank which recently merged with UTI Bank.
After the merger, the government has declared the GTB-UTI Bank as a government bank with all the attendant benefits that accrue to such an enterprise. As a result, the State Bank of Hyderabad, the government's revenue collection centre since its inception, has now been left high and dry.
On Mr Naidu's proposed ventures, the website says, recently he bought about 100 acres near a coastal village at Gopalpur, Orissa, where he plans to set up a nursery of synthetic pearls with technology from a Central institute based at Visakhapatnam.
He also has nearly 45 acres on Hosur Road near Bangalore which is planned for his corporate office and another unit of Heritage, his family venture. He also has plans to set up a fruit pulp factory near Bangalore.
Tehelka reports that Global Trust chairman Mr Ramesh Gelli is one of Mr Naidu's trusted financial dealers. Not only had the bank lent huge advances to the TDP for elections, it had also helped out the state government on several overdrafts.
The site quotes an internal RBI memo of October 2000 stating that GTB is one of the regular repo bonders which have been vouching for the Andhra Pradesh government. The GTB had vouched nearly Rs 35 crore, 42 crore and 74 crore on three occasions for periods less than a week against overdraft payments of the government, the site says.
Mr Naidu in turn has allotted land to Mr Gelli that was slated to set up an insurance regulatory authority. He has also given him a five-acre plot near the Hi-Tec City for a software unit.
Tehelka charts the laptop CM's various business ventures in the 80s such as Bhuvaneshwari Carbides (named after his wife) and Hotel Vishnupriya at Tirupati, which failed.
But between 1989 and 1994, he promoted his personal enterprise in a big way. Mr Naidu built a palatial house in Jubilee Hills at a cost of nearly Rs 50 lakh and raised a 300-acre orchard at Ballayapalli, Nellore. The land he bought at Rs 8,000 per acre is today worth almost Rs 300,000 per acre now, reports tehelka.
The chief minister's other major enterprise is at Kuppam, his home constituency, where he promoted Heritage with machinery bought from Holland. Heritage supplies nearly 25,000 litres of milk to Bangalore every day. He has set up another unit at Nakrekal near Hyderabad that provides 15,000 litres to the city.
His other enterprise at Kuppam is a joint farming venture spread over nearly 2,000 acres (most of which belongs to Mr Naidu) with Israeli technical support, including lining reservoir beds with polythene sheets to contain evaporation. He declared his assets in early 1995 as Rs 75 lakh and that of his wife as Rs 3 crore, apart from some real estate plots near the Hi-Tec City. He also has flats in Mumbai, Chennai and Ooty, according to tehelka.
The site says the Desam parliamentary party leader, Mr K Yerran Naidu, and another MP, Mr S Venugopalachari, while in the United Front government made bumper deals for Mr Naidu. It also says that to further his IT interests, Mr Naidu has bought 120 acres in the Hi-Tec City area.
He is also said to have some interests in the construction of a shopping mall in Malaysia and a hotel in Singapore.
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