Top Tamil Nadu ministers, including Panneerselvam, on mining baron's payroll?

Alleged diary entries of a mining baron, accessed by Times Now, point to a kickback scheme in which the entire Tamil Nadu cabinet may be involved. The entries, according to Times Now, carry mentions of payments made to some ministers and bureaucrats in the state cabinet.

The entries seem to hint that the Tamil Nadu chief minister E Palaniswami, deputy chief minister O Panneerselvam and TTV Dhinakaran from Sasikala camp had been under the payroll of the mining baron J Sekar Reddy.
The papers revealed that the deputy chief minister was allegedly paid Rs 2.5 crore by Reddy.
"On 23/11/2016, health has been bribed of Rs 2 crore," reads a diary entry. In another entry, which was made just after the first one, it says, "health has been bribed for Rs 3 crore."

These entries were made when former chief minister J Jayalalithaa was in the Apollo Hospital in Chennai.

Another entry in the diary indicates that P Thangamani, Tamil Nadu's Electricity Minister and "Krishnaswamy MLA, revenue minister PSO and other entries which points out to M Periyavar, where 'm' seems to stand for the minister, meaning O Panneerselvam and his secretary Ramesh both have been paid in crores.


So far, there have been four ministers -- O Panneerslevam, Deputy Chief Minister, MC Sampath, Industries Minister, Vijaya Bhaskar, Health Minister, B Udaykumar, Revenue Minister -- who have been named in the diary pages for the alleged kickbacks.