Bhubaneswar: Senior BJP leader Pratap Sarangi Wednesday called Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik a ‘Pradhan Lootera’ while boasting about the virtues of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Addressing a press meet on the chit fund issue, Sarangi said, “Prime Minister Modi is going around the state telling people about what he has done. The CM should have been the Pradhan Sevak of the state, but he is ‘Pradhan Lootera.’ He gave patronage to chit fund scam culprits.”
Raking up the chit fund issue, the BJP leader said the Naveen government has been giving patronage to many tainted leaders like Rabindra Jena, Pravat Biswal and others and made victims of the chit fund scams suffer.
“The Naveen government seems to be in no mood to punish the culprits. The government promoted them. The CM never cared to arrest the real culprits of the chit fund scam. The CBI had to intervene,” Sarangi said.
The BJP leader also asked why public fund was being used to compensate victims instead of tacking it back from the culprits.
“The government announced that it would return the funds looted by the chit fund scamsters by creating a corpus. The CM could not get the money back from the looters and forced taxpayers to pay for the failure of the government. How many people really got their money back from the government,” Sarangi asked.
He added, “How did the Naveen government think of giving tickets to chit fund culprits? That means the BJD government has assured them that it will continue to patronise them. The government has also been giving misleading information in the Assembly as well as for RTI queries on the matter. The government is helping the culprits.”
Sarangi also demanded that the BJD government come out with a white paper and tell the electorate when the victims of the chit fund scam will get compensation.