AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal says the party is not guilty of any wrongdoing over allegations of receiving hawala funding
Arvind Kejriwal, who is running for Chief Minister of Delhi, today denied that his party should be held responsible for failing to verify the financial DNA of four companies who donated two crores in April last year, and whose collective records suggest dubious accounts and fake addresses.
"Does hawala money move through cheques? Would we have posted the details of these donations on our website if we were guilty of wrongdoing?" he said in an interview to NDTV. "We will return the money if a court orders this," he said.
Yesterday, a group of supporters who quit Mr Kejriwal's Aam Aadmi Party last year highlighted donations of Rs 50 lakh each made by four companies at midnight on April 5, 2014. The group - which calls itself AVAM or AAP Volunteer Action Manch - said that the companies were fronts for money-laundering. The BJP, which is battling Mr Kejriwal in the Delhi election, dubbed the controversy "hawala at midnight" and dared the AAP leader to explain why he has defaulted on the standards of transparency that he has long professed as a USP of his party.
Mr Kejriwal's argument is that his party is not equipped to examine the background of donors. As long as donation is made by cheque and not cash, he said, the party accepts it. "Let anyone investigate the companies. And us. If we are found guilty, give us the harshest punishment," he said.
But Mr Kejriwal for months held press conferences where he claimed to expose what he described as the complicated and murky business dealings of businessmen like Robert Vadra, the son-in-law of Congress President Sonia Gandhi. When asked why those same skills in decoding business records did not apply to his own donors, Mr Kejriwal said, "Studying one company takes half a day. We have 35,000 transactions. How can we check the records for each one?"