He is one of India’s richest MPs, with assets worth Rs 338 crore, and was once a close aide of Telugu Desam Party (TDP) leader N Chandrababu Naidu. On Saturday, the Enforcement Directorate (ED) attached properties and other assets worth Rs 96.21 crore belonging to Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) MP Nama Nageshwara Rao’s Madhucon Group of companies and its directors and promoters in a money laundering case.
The 65-year-old Rao made a big splash in 2009 by defeating Congress heavyweight Renuka Chowdhury from Khammam in the parliamentary elections. He founded Madhucon Projects in 1983. The company was into the construction of roads, highways, and infrastructure projects. With the TDP’s backing, Rao turned the small firm into an infrastructure behemoth. He also created several special purpose vehicles and branched out to sugar and power projects, and mining.
In March 2019, Rao left the TDP for the TRS. The same month, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) conducted raids on the Madhucon Group, which has faced allegations of fund diversion several times. This time, the company was accused of diverting more than Rs 260 crore allotted for the construction of the Ranchi-Rargoan-Jamshedpur national highway. The ED initiated its investigation based on the CBI’s FIR. It claimed to have seized incriminating evidence and unaccounted Rs 34 lakh in cash from Rao’s home.
“ED investigation revealed that M/s Ranchi Expressways Limited represented by its directors & promoters obtained loans of Rs 1,030 crore (approx) from the consortium of banks led by Canara Bank. Madhucon Group did not utilise the entire loan amount for its stated purposes, and diverted it to its associated entities and utilised it for other works and also directly siphoned off the loans by giving bogus works to its related shell entities,” the central agency alleged.
Rao’s friends in the TDP and now in the TRS describe him as a very simple person. “He is one of the richest persons in Telangana but he is not flashy. He lives very simply and maintains a very low profile. After he joined active politics, he gave up his position in the company he founded and nurtured for so many years,” said a colleague in the TRS.
In the TDP, he worked as a diligent member in the party backroom for almost 15 years and following his victory from Khamman in 2009, Naidu appointed him the floor leader of the TDP parliamentary party. But soon, differences appeared between the MP and the party leadership over the Telangana issue. In February 2014, while the UPA government was considering creating the separate state, Rao met then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and told him that if the Telangana Bill was introduced in Parliament the TDP’s two MPs from Telangana — he and Ramesh Rathod from Adilabad — would back it. Rao said it was more about supporting the region he belonged to rather than rebelling against his party.
That year, he lost the parliamentary elections to the YSR Congress Party’s P Srinivas Reddy. Four years later, he contested from the Khammam Assembly constituency but lost to the TRS’s Ajay Puvvada. After that, he joined the ruling party in the state and in 2019 returned to the Lok Sabha by defeating Renuka Chowdhury once again.