Kushala Satyanarayana

Congress

Karnataka

Bengaluru

KJ George

Uttar Pradesh

Bangalore North

Sadananda Gowda

Nagarjuna Construction Company

Jayachandra

Chikkarayappa

Larsen

Thegovernment incried itself hoarse that the steel flyover was meant to ease traffic flow to the airport. In fact, minutes before the project was called off,in-charge ministermaintained that the flyover was supposed to help motorists.That was all bunkum.Investigations by the income-tax department and the ‘chatter’ it picked up from sub-contractors from 2015 has proved that the flyover was meant only to help Congress fight elections inA large project such as the steel flyover (which was supposed to cost Bengaluru around Rs 1,800 crore) typically involves several medium to small contractors, who take up the actual construction work in conformity with the mandated specifications.Although the contract was awarded on September 28, 2016, the sub-contractors were already confident of kickbacks and pay-offs way back in late 2015.In fact, Union minister andMP DVhad also alleged last year that the flyover was meant for UP, not Bengaluru.The trail of the alleged kickbacks started when income tax officials raided the premises of a few civil contractors who execute public works department and irrigation department projects in November-December 2015.Among the documents found were entries pointing to some steel bridge project which was under discussion, for which the contractors had paid kickbacks to bag sub-contracts.In the following months, the state government started talking seriously about the steel flyover and finalised L&T andas its joint-contractor.In fact, back then, the entries were just numbers, which over subsequent months, connected the dots.The information also gave clues which led the taxmen to the doorstep of MLC K Govindaraju in March 2016, from where the diary with entries of alleged kickbacks paid was recovered with initials written against the amounts.During the course of the inquiry, it was gathered by the enforcement authorities that the steel flyover was a contract that was also looked at as a “fund raiser’’ for the ensuing Uttar Pradesh polls and the mandate was to raise around Rs 600 crore.And there were some key players in this master plan whose skeletons could tumble out now.“The civil contractors who were searched manage to bag 15 per cent of the government projects every year. As per the information found with them, the steel flyover was much talked about even before it went public. One piece of information led to another, and finally to the diary. Evenand(now suspended senior officials of PWD and irrigations departments) were searched, among other things, to find the steel flyover trail. But nothing in that direction was found,’’explained sources.According to the sources chasing the steel flyover transaction trail, while Rs 65 crore mentioned in the “G diary” is alleged to have exchanged hands, Rs 500-odd crore is still said to be pending.Post the 8/11 currency demonetisation, the black money market too hit a low for a while and the enforcement authorities were also tracking such payments.However, for the last one year at least, the enforcement authorities are tracking transactions pertaining to the steel flyover project that created quite an uproar among the citizens demanding that the project be shelved to save the city’s environment.The seizure of the diary allegedly found at Govindaraju’s premises during an I-T raid was the last straw – the government dropped the project on Thursday, supposedly “to come clean on graft charges’’.In September last, the state cabinet approved the steel flyover project for Rs 1,791 crore and L&T was awarded the contract. While the initial estimated cost was Rs 1,130 crore, the company had quoted Rs 1,856 crore. After a series of negotiations, the work contract was pegged at Rs 1,791 crore, and finalised.Months before this, when the project was tendered, the lowest financial bidder happened to beand Tubro which had quoted 41 per cent more than the estimated cost.