Midas Touch Minister Piyush Goyal sold another company at huge profit

Union Minister Piyush Goyal, a Chartered Accountant and a former treasurer of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), is fast gaining a public reputation for his Midas touch. Weeks after reports that he and his wife invested Rs 1 lakh in a company and raked in ₹30 crore in 10 years, comes another report that suggests that Goyal and his wife invested ₹5 lakh in a company in 2000 and sold it in 2014 for ₹48 crore.

The three richest ministers in 2016-17 were Arun Jaitley (₹113 crore), Harsimrat Kaur Badal (₹108 crore) and Piyush Goyal (₹95 crore).

Goyal himself has not publicly reacted to the earlier reports. And on Saturday, news portal The Wire reported that the minister had not responded to the questions sent to him before publishing the latest report.

The latest report on Piyush Goyal in The Wire states:

• Goyal and his wife set up Flashnet Info Solutions (Pvt) Ltd in the year 2000 with 50,070 shares of ₹10 each.
• Goyal and his wife together held 99.9% of the shares
• The shares were sold in September 2014 for ₹48 crore at a premium of 1,00,000% to Piramal Estates Pvt Ltd.
• While Goyal disclosed his and his wife’s controlling interest in Flashnet in 2010, he made no mention of it in his asset declarations to the PMO in 2014, 2015 and 2016.
• The shares were sold four months after Goyal became Union Minister in May 2014. But he made no mention of it in his declaration to the PMO made in July, 2014.
• His statements in subsequent years did not reflect the payment received by the Goyals by selling their shares in Flashnet.
• In both 2014 and in 2015, his declarations claimed the book value of Goyal’s ‘unquoted securities’ as exactly the same, ie ₹101,300 (rupees one lakh and three hundred only).
• However, the book value of the unquoted securies held by his wife in 2016 was shown as ₹33 crore.

The Wire story raises the question of ethics and conflict of interest because the Piramal group had diversified into power and renewable energy sectors in 2013 while Goyal was a Union Minister of State with independent charge of power and energy when he sold his shares to Piramal.

Significantly, Flashnet showed a profit of ₹34 lakh in 2014. But in subsequent years Piramal Estates Pvt Ltd., which had acquired and renamed the company, began showing losses in crores.

The Wire Editor-in-Chief Siddharth Varadarajan on Saturday tweeted the following: