VW scamster had another deal in the works

HYDERABAD: Had the whistle not been blown on the Volkswagen scandal, the AP government might well have parted with another 1,400 acres of land in Visakhapatnam to another dubious project.
No, the beneficiary would not have been Volkswagen, it was to be a company by the name of Kapcol. Yes, it had something in common with Volkswagen: Jagadish Alagar Raja, the man associated with the Vashishta Wahan scandal, seems to have been active in pursuing the case of this company too.
If sources in the AP government are to be believed, Raja roped in the botcher Botcha Satyanarayana to identify a suitable tract of land for Kapcol.Apparently, the company was to set up a Rs 2400-crore aluminium smelter in the port city and the land was required for the project.
The only problem with the project was that nobody had ever heard of the company before. According to a memorandum of understanding (MoU) it signed with the AP government, Kapcol said it was from Gujarat. The man running the show was a Rashmi Desai based in Vadodara. A search on the internet shows only one hit for this company, which is about Rashmi Desai talking in Venezuela recently about a smelter project in India.
The MoU was signed in the time of Chandrababu Naidu in January 2003 during the CII Partnership Summit.
Sources suggest that later Kapcol added on an 800-mw coal-based power plant project to make the proposal even more ambitious. The company also suggested that it had a complete buyback agreement with some Chinese firms and was planning to enter into MoUs with the National Mineral Development Corporation (NMDC) and other private firms to secure bauxite.
Sources say that Satyanarayana took Raja and the Kapcol officials personally to the proposed SEZ area in Vizag in January this year and directed the APIIC to acquire the land for the company. The project seems to have been given a burial only after the Volkswagen afair emerged.
Minister Satyanarayana could not be reached for his comment.