Appalled if Chandrababu Naidu was arrested on my statement- Retd IAS officer PV Ramesh| TDP| Jagan

Retired IAS officer PV Ramesh who was Special Finance Secretary of Andhra Pradesh when the skill development project was rolled out has expressed surprise and disappointment at reports that suggest that former chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu was arrested based on his statement. Speaking to TNM’s Editor-in-Chief Dhanya Rajendran, he said that according to him, there was no illegality in the skill development project. He maintained that Naidu had a personal interest in the project and therefore there was nothing unusual that he asked the chief secretary to expedite it. He also said that a note of caution that his colleague Suneetha IAS made on the project finance disbursement proposal was being read out of context. He said that though Suneetha was of the opinion that a pilot project could be tried out first, Naidu’s vision was to transform an agrarian economy into a manufacturing one and therefore a large scale project was required. He asked if the Andhra Pradesh CID had any proof to show that the money transferred from DesignTech, the company that was part of the project, to other so-called shell companies, was indeed the money that Andhra Pradesh government had given them.