Congress president Sonia Gandhi and her son, party vice president Rahul, are in a fresh spot of trouble, with the Delhi High Court giving its nod for an income tax (I-T) investigation into the National Herald case. The duo had already faced the prospect of jail in connection with the case.
Sonia and Rahul are among the stakeholders of the Young Indian Company, which allegedly bought the $15 million debt of the parent company of the newspaper National Herald using funds from the Congress, and then rented out its properties — worth around $335 million — for profit. A case in this regard had been filed by BJP leader Subramanian Swamy.
National Herald, the newspaper, was started by Jawaharlal Nehru well before India's independence, and when it and its parent company — Associated Journals Limited, which had two other publications — closed shop in 2008, had about $15 million debt.
When Young Indian Company bought this debt along with Associated Journals, it also got its properties worth $335 million, some of which could have been easily sold in order to pay off the debt it had. However, Young Indian Company instead chose to give out these properties as rent, and thereby made profit from it.
And since Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are primary stakeholders of Young Indian Company — they own 76 percent stake in it — they are the ones under the bigger scanner here. A case against them and other stakeholders had been filed in a Patiala House court in Delhi earlier, but they had moved the Delhi HC against an I-T department probe into the matter. It was this matter that the high court decided on on Friday.
