Hyderabad: Telugu Desam Party president N Chandrababu Naidu on Friday declared his and his family's assets, totalling about Rs 38 crore. Naidu said he was declaring only the acquisition cost and not the market value of the assets since the latter varied from time to time.
While the TDP chief's personal assets stood at Rs 39.88 lakh, his wife Bhuvaneswari - who heads the family's business venture Heritage Foods - had assets worth Rs 39.57 crore in her name.
She also has loans and advances amounting to Rs 12.38 crore, thereby reducing the net value to Rs 27.18 crore. The Jubilee Hills residence, where the family stays, was under mortgage as Naidu's wife obtained loan on it for business development.
Naidu's son Lokesh, who also manages the family businesses, has assets worth Rs 6.82 crore and liabilities of Rs nine crore. Lokesh's wife Brahmani inherited assets worth Rs 3.22 crore from her father Nandamuri Balakrishna, a leading Telugu film star.
"We have not given any assets to Brahmani after marriage," Naidu said. Besides the personal assets, the family also has stakes in a business venture Nirvana Holdings amounting to Rs 15.75 crore, which also has liabilities amounting to Rs 15.37 crore.
"My family's Heritage Foods is a public limited company listed in the stock market. It's current share value is Rs 172 and our family holds 48.82 per cent of shares in Heritage," Naidu said, adding that it's market capitalisation stood at Rs 214 crore. Heritage's liabilities amounted to Rs 95 crore as
on March 31, 2011.
On what prompted him to declare his family's assets now, Naidu said, "In 1999, when I was Chief Minister, we started the system of assets being declared by ministers and MLAs.
Now, when there is a widespread anti-corruption movement in the country, I wanted to set a new trend by declaring not only mine and my wife's assets but also those of my son and daughter-in-law. They too readily agreed to uphold transparency."
Noting that "making money is not a crime", the TDP leader stressed that the means should be legal. "You should not make money by abusing power or through
dubious means. Ours is a contented family and we never followed illegitimate ways to make money," he said.
"The main allegation against me is that I earned Rs 2,000 crore from being the owner of a mere two acre farm land. But if you look at our family history, we were into different businesses since the early 1980s and even donated 3.74 acres of land for infrastructure development in my native village Naravaripalli in Chittoor district. I have never committed an illegal act in my life," he claimed.
Naidu said if anyone proved that he had acquired wealth by illegal means, "I will give away such assets, if any, to whoever proves them. This is an incentive."
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