New Delhi:
The Enforcement Directorate (ED) conducted raids on Friday at five locations linked to DMK leader and Member of Parliament Kathir Anand.
Kathir Anand is the son of S Duraimurugan, a senior DMK leader and the second-in-command in the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin cabinet, represents the Vellore Lok Sabha constituency.
The ED had carried out searches at the premises of DMK leader and Tamil Nadu Forest Minister K Ponmudy and his son Gautham Sigamani in a money laundering case in July 2023. These actions against its party’s leaders have prompted the DMK to blame political vendetta.
In 2019, then-President Ram Nath Kovind had acted on a recommendation from the Election Commission of India to rescind the Lok Sabha election in Vellore due to the seizure of Rs 11 crore unaccounted cash from Kathir Anand and locations linked to him. Two days before the April 18, 2019 election, the polls in Vellore were cancelled.
A reelection was held in August 2019, where Kathir Anand won on a DMK ticket by a narrow margin of 8,141 votes. He defeated AIADMK’s AC Shanmugham. He again defeated the latter, who had by then joined the BJP, in the 2024 Lok Sabha election. He secured a comfortable victory with a margin of 2,15,702 votes.
In November last year, Mr Stalin accused “new parties” of wanting to “eliminate” the DMK amid a war of words with actor-politician Vijay, after the latter targeted to the DMK on multiple issues. Mr Stalin played down the import of such threats, declaring, “I can only say, ‘long live those who chide us’.”
