Lagadapati Rajgopal, the Congress MP from Vijayawada, who is leading the anti-Telangana movement, is involved in another mega scam. (Read about his past scams here: The True Face of Lagadapati Rajgopal)
This time, his company LANCO Infratech has illegally bagged several projects to set up Solar Power projects under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission. LANCO created several fictitious paper companies to dupe the central government as each company was eligible for only one solar power project. By indulging in this blatant fraud, LANCO has got its hands over 235 MW of allocation, almost a quarter of the total 1,000 MW to be derived from solar radiation under the first phase of National Solar Mission. And with this it has cornered an assured revenue of about Rs 13,000 crore.
Delhi based NGO Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) conducted a detailed investigation and published a sensational story of how Lagadapati Rajgopal’s company resorted to this mega scam.
Photo: Documents prove LANCO owns all the front companies
When the government published the list of selected companies under National Solar Mission, Delhi based CSE smelled something was fishy. Most of the companies, which won the Solar Power Projects, had no history what so ever. The CSE team then went to inspect some project sites. This is when they came to know that LANCO was involved in this scam.
CSE investigation revealed LANCO employees or their family members were directors of some of these companies. Others were set up by companies with strong commercial ties with LANCO.
Photo: Same LANCO employee signed the land lease agreements on behalf of Newton Solar Pvt Ltd and Diwakar Solar projects
Lagadapati Rajgopal’s LANCO and its fronts bid for the Solar Photo Voltaic projects in a unified fashion, quoting similar tariffs with 5 paise jump between each bid. The Detailed Project Reports—giving technical and financial details of the proposed projects—are almost identical for the seven PV projects and the two solar thermal projects. They use the same text and graphs with only slight modification. In the project reports of KVK and Diwakar Solar Thermal one can see adjustments made in the same handwriting—one person must have prepared both the reports. According to documents from the Jodhpur Discom, all of the seven PV projects are financed by Axis Bank. (with inputs from CSE)