‘Mahua Moitra gave me Parliament account access’: Businessman claims in affidavit
Businessman Darshan Hiranandani on Thursday submitted an affidavit before.
The Ethics Committee of Parliament, claiming that Trinamool Congress MP Mahua Moitra had shared her Parliamentary login ID and password so that he could “post questions on her behalf”.
Shortly after Hiranandani’s affidavit came out, Mahua Moitra released her own statement, questioning the authenticity of the businessman’s affidavit.
The development comes days after BJP MP Nishikant Dubey claimed that TMC’s Mahua Moitra took “bribes” to ask questions in the House. Dubey cited Supreme Court lawyer Jai Anant Dehadrai’s letter to claim that the latter had “irrefutable” evidence that bribes were exchanged between Moitra and businessman Darshan Hiranandani.
On Tuesday, Trinamool Congress’s Mahua Moitra sent a legal notice to BJP MP Nishikant Dubey and advocate Jai Anant Dehadrai over “defamatory” allegations that she took “bribes” to ask questions in the Lok Sabha. She said that charges that she accepted “any benefit of any kind to perform her duties as a Member of Lok Sabha” were “defamatory, false, baseless, and not supported by even a shred of evidence”.
Earlier, the Hiranandani group had denied the allegations and said it was “not involved in the business of politics”.
However, on Thursday, Darshan Hiranandani claimed that Mahua Moitra wanted to “quickly make a name for herself at the national level” and that she was “advised by her friends and advisors that the shortest route to fame is by personally attacking PM Narendra Modi”.
Hiranandani claimed that Moitra attempted to “malign and embarrass the Prime Minister by targeting Adani.” “She shared with me her email ID as MP, so that I could send her information, and she could raise the questions in Parliament,” Hiranandani said. “I went along with her proposal”.
He claimed that Mahua Moitra “made frequent demands of me and kept asking me for various favours…The demands that were made and favours that were asked included, gifting her expensive luxury items, providing support on the renovation of her officially allotted bungalow in Delhi, travel expenses, holidays, etc,”
Hiranandani further claimed that he felt Moitra was “taking undue advantage” of him and “pressurising” him to do things.
Hiranandani said he was filing the affidavit since the matter “involves him directly and has snowballed into a political controversy” with the matter now placed before the Parliamentary Privilege Committee and the judiciary.
MAHUA MOITRA HITS BACK
In a press statement shared on X, Mahua Moitra questioned the credibility of the affidavit, and said it is on “white paper and not an official letterhead or notarized”.
“The contents of the letter (affidavit) are a joke,” she said.
Mahua Moitra further claimed that the affidavit had been drafted by the “Prime Minister’s Office” in a bid to target her.
“The BJP government has been waiting to somehow shut me up on the Adani issue desperately,” she claimed in her letter.
In a sensational claim, Moitra also said that Darshan Hiranandani was “forced” to sign the affidavit by the “Prime Minister’s Office”.