J Gopikrishnan on the Pioneer: Union Petroleum Minister M Veerappa Moily could be in the dock for raising funds for his family controlled trust from a corporate giant when he was Corporate Affairs Minister. Moily faces another serious case of conflict of interest as a top official of Reliance Industries is advisor to a company controlled by Moily's son Harsha Moily.

Even earlier, the Minister has faced charges of favouring Reliance in the KG basin case. Veerappa Moily has been president of Kissan Sabha Trust (KST), which received huge funds from ITC from Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) budget in September 2012.

His son Harsha Moily's email message to his partner Sudhir P clearly showed that Moily himself managed the fund from the ITC for his private trust. "Sudhir '" Dad just called and confirmed that ITC has approved the funding the operating expenses of KST (Kissan Sabha Trust) for the next five years.

Therefore, for ITC to process the payments, we have to immediately furnish ITC all OpEx bills for Karkala & Chikaballarpur for the academic year 2011-12. Request you to do the needful,' said the email message, which was also forwarded to Moily's official email vmoily@ kar.nic.in.  

The subject of the message was Capital Budget for Kissan Sabha Trust for Funding. The Kissan Sabha Trust is a family-controlled trust of Moily. It was established decades ago and is running educational institutes and charitable organisations in Karkala and Chikaballarpur in Karnataka.

In addition to Moily, his wife Malathy, son Harsha and daughter Sushma too are members of the trust. "The total capital cost for Karkala school comes to `1.71 crore and for Chikkaballarpur school `3.10 crore. Total capital cost comes to `4.81 crore'. For operating the schools, our budget right now is `50 lakh for this year and will increase with PUC students getting admitted.

Hence we may ask for a corpus fund of `6 crore to fund the day to day operations @ 8% per annum,' said an earlier email sent by Sudhir to Harsha Moily. The email messages between the duo talk about approaching the corporate sector for the requirements of the trust. The person, Sudhir P, referred in this mail is Sudhir K Prabhu. He is also a Director in one of the companies run by Moily's son  and the Karnataka branch head of a Mumbai-based Chartered Accountant's firm, which audits companies of Harsha Moily.