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Kerala Home Ministry Seeks Files Related to Probe into Lee See Been’s Suicide
Thiruvananthapuram : Troubles show no signs of abating for Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. Opposition parties and the ‘Cockroach Janata Party’ are demanding his resignation due to questions raised regarding his decisions at the Election Commission. Meanwhile, files dating back two decades concerning him have been reopened in Kerala. The Kerala Home Ministry has summoned files related to a preliminary inquiry conducted by the Vigilance Bureau against Gyanesh Kumar, who was serving as the Works Secretary in 2006.
The Vigilance and Anti-Corruption Bureau had conducted a preliminary inquiry against Gyanesh Kumar twenty years ago following the suicide of a Malaysian civil engineer. Media reports, citing sources, reported that the Kerala Home Ministry has sought files related to the investigation launched after the suicide of Lee See Been. Lee See Been was the Chief Project Manager for PATI-BEL, an Indo-Malaysian consortium involved in upgrading the MC Road under the multi-billion-dollar Kerala State Transport Project.
Lee committed suicide in Kuala Lumpur. There was speculation that government officials had obstructed his efforts to get bills cleared. The name of Gyanesh Kumar, a 1998-batch IAS officer, also appeared in Lee’s suicide note, in which Lee wrote about the corruption surrounding the project’s implementation. The LDF government in power at the time had ordered a vigilance inquiry into the matter.
However, the vigilance inquiry was subsequently halted. Sources state that not many documents were recovered during the initial inquiry and search operations. At the time, Gyanesh Kumar was the Secretary of the Public Works Department (PWD) in Kerala. The matter recently gained public attention after senior CPM leader TM Thomas Isaac wrote a social media post about it.
In his post, Isaac stated that Gyanesh Kumar was among the officials named in the suicide note of Malaysian official Lee Been Seen. According to Isaac, the note contained detailed allegations regarding corruption, mismanagement, and harassment by PWD officials, and Gyanesh Kumar’s name was included in this context. These allegations led to a vigilance inquiry, and Gyanesh Kumar was transferred out of the PWD before the end of 2006; subsequently, he moved to the Union Ministry of Defence.
Report : Abhijit Tushar Bhatt (Political Editor)
