Belagavi, Dec 12: Senior Legislator K Pratapchandra Shetty of Congress was unanimously elected as Karnataka Legislative Council Chairman here on Wednesday during the ongoing Winter Session at Suvarna Vikas Soudha.
Mr Shetty was the lone candidate who had filed his nomination papers yesterday. The senior leader from Udupi has been a four-time MLA and three time MLC.
Senior member of the house and former Minister S R Patil and Allam Veerbhadrappa, both from Congress proposed Mr Shetty's name.
Bengaluru, May 22: Karnataka Congress delegation met Chief Election Commissioner, Dr B Basavaraju in Bengaluru, urging him to guide Karnataka Government to conduct local body elections and not to allow State government to nominate their party men to the local bodies.
The delegation was led by Congress leader Siddaramaiah and Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee (KPCC) president D K Shivakumar.
"They (State government) wants to postpone the election, they have a lot of other provisions. We are demanding to protect the law, the government doesn't have the power to interfere in the system. We will not allow the state government to nominate their party men.
The CM and his entire team is responsible for this, they are killing the democracy and Panchayati Raj system of the State," said Shivakumar while speaking to the reporters.
The local body elections were scheduled to take place in the month of March or April, which were postponed in view of the COVID-19 crisis.
However, the date for conducting the local body elections has not been decided yet.
Bengaluru, Jan 19: The long-awaited discussions on cabinet expansion finally took place between BJP national president Amit Shah and the state party unit on Saturday, but they produced no result.
Latest indications are that new members will be appointed only after CM BS Yediyurappa returns from Davos, Switzerland, on January 25.
The party held a close-door party meeting at a top hotel in Hubballi. The subject of expanding the cabinet, which currently has 16 vacancies, featured in the talks.
Earlier, Yediyurappa reportedly had a one-on-one with Shah during their 45-minute flight from Bengaluru to Hubballi. He is said to have insisted on accommodating all 11 newly MLAs in the cabinet. These legislators were earlier a part of Congress and JD(S); they contested the December byelections on BJP tickets and won.
This apart, BJP sources said, Yediyurappa and Shah had a brief chat at a private event at Palace Grounds . Separately, Shah, who is the Union home minister, held meetings with Jagadish Shettar, Laxman Savadi and Prahlad Joshi, seeking their views on cabinet expansion.
Shah also wanted to get an idea of what people think about the Yediyurappa government’s performance.
Newly elected MLAs Ramesh Jarkiholi, BC Patil and Srimanth Patil greeted Shah. “We only met him to wish him; we didn’t discuss the cabinet issue. That’s something state BJP members will do,” said Hirekerur legislator BC Patil.
Saturday’s deliberations fail to break the stalemate over the cabinet appointments. There are clear differences in the camp about whether all Congress-JD(S) defectors should be made cabinet members, according to a senior minister attended one such meeting.
Shah reportedly wants only seven to eight newly elected MLAs to be made ministers; the rest of the spots should go to BJP loyalists. Yediyurappa disagrees with this position as he had promised all 13 turncoats places in the cabinet. Two lost in the bypolls.
Shah has now asked Yediyurappa to visit Delhi after returning from Davos to finalise the composition of the cabinet, according to the sources.
Yediyurappa will leave for Davos early on Sunday, while Shah will fly directly to Delhi from Hubballi.
Dubai, May 30: Taking advantage of Vande Bharat Mission, a notorious NRI conman has fled to India through a repatriation flight after duping several businessmen in United Arab Emirates and stealing goods worth nearly six million dirhams.
Yogesh Ashok Yariava, 36, owner of the fraudulent Royal Luck Foodstuff Trading and prime suspect in the audacious scam took a flight to Hyderabad from Abu Dhabi on May 11 with around 170 repatriates.
His mandatory two-week quarantine period would have ended on May 25, but for his 40 odd victims a protracted battle for justice has just begun.
Last Wednesday many of them trooped down to the Indian Consulate office in Dubai in the hope of getting an audience with Consul General Vipul. The following day they went to Bur Dubai police station clutching dud bank cheques.
In a replay of the familiar trading scam, conmen representing Royal Luck Foodstuff approached unsuspecting traders and made bulk purchases against post-dated cheques.
They bought anything they could get their hands on: Facemasks, hand sanisters and medical gloves worth nearly half a million dirhams from Skydent Medical Equipment, Raheeq Laboratories and GSA Star; rice and nuts (Dh393,000) from Al Baraka Foods; tuna, pistachios and saffron (Dh300,725) from Yes Buy General Trading; French fries and mozzarella cheese (Dh229,000) from Mehdu General Trading; frozen Indian beef (Dh207,000) from Al Ahbab General Trading and halwa and tahina (Dh52812) from Emirates Sesame Factory. It’s a long list and it keeps getting longer as more victims come forward.
When their post-dated cheques started bouncing, the traders rushed to Royal Luck’s Opal Tower office in Business Bay. But it was too late. They had shut down and all their 18 staffers had disappeared. Visits to their warehouses also drew a blank.
“Calls made to the company’s sweet-talking purchase managers who visited us days earlier carrying fancy business cards remained unanswered,” said Chandrasekaran Ganesan of Ajman-based Skydent Medical Equipment which supplied protective face masks worth Dh175,875.
Another business owner, Anand Asar said he visited Royal Luck’s office after his cheque of Dh79,552 returned marked insufficient funds. “The security guard at the building told us their staff was last seen on May 17,” said Asar who has since lodged a police complaint.
“I am devastated. I don’t know how I will recover my losses,” said another trader.
Victims reckon the ill-gotten goods have been sold to third parties at dirt cheap prices.
“They have got millions of dirhams worth of goods against worthless pieces of paper. The scammers would rack up huge profits even if they sell our stuff for one tenth their price,” said another trader who pegged his losses at Dh200,000.
The scam comes close on the heels a Dh4 million fruit loot in which 810 tonnes of fruits shipped by Indian exporters to OPC Foodstuff Trading in Deira, Dubai were similarly stolen last month.
Legal adviser Salam Pappinisseri from Sharjah based United Advocates that represents five firms which have collectively lost over Dh550,000 said they are weighing legal action against the prime suspect Yogesh Ashok Variava in both India and the UAE.
“Yogesh, originally from Mumbai, absconded from the UAE with large amounts of money on an emergency evacuation flight. It’s strange that the fraudster got a seat in the flight which was meant to bring stranded Indian citizens who had registered with the Indian embassy and consulate requesting repatriation on urgent grounds,” said Pappinisseri.
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CONGRATULATIONS AND ALL THE BEST ON THE OCCASSION OF ELECTED KARNATAKA SPEAKER.
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