Four Keralites face charges in connection with the multi-million-rupee Kuwait-Indian School scam, of whom two have been arrested in Kuwait, sources said here yesterday. Kuwaiti authorities have reportedly alerted Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states to arrest one of them – K.P. Mohanan – if he arrives in any of the Gulf states.

Over 5,000 Indian students are on the school rolls. The students, their parents and 250-odd staff members of the Kuwait-Indian School were in jitters after a preliminary scrutiny of the school accounts revealed that a sum of more than Rs400 million was missing.

Of those arrested, Mathew Philip, former chairman of the School Ad Hoc Committee, has reportedly been in a Kuwait jail for the last four months, while the other, Thomas Chandy, who runs another school in the Gulf country and had several dealings with the Kuwait-Indian School, was allegedly let off on bail after he paid back the school the KD41,332 (more than Rs6 million) he owed to them.
According to the bail terms, he cannot travel out of Kuwait until the investigations and court proceedings are over. Sources named the other two Keralites wanted in the case as K.P. Mohanan, a former Kuwait Times employee, who is now the executive president of the Malayalam satellite channel Asianet, and former Indian ambassador to Kuwait B.M.C. Nair.

Mohanan was the secretary of the Ad Hoc Committee, while Nair in his capacity as ambassador formed the committee and allegedly facilitated the scam. The then Indian embassy first secretary Sanjeev Kumar is also named in the case.
The Kuwait Ministry of Justice has issued an arrest warrant against Mohanan. The Ministry of Interior, the Kuwait City Department, subsequently produced before the court a list of his arrivals and departures in the six month period from 8-7-1999 to 11-1-2000.

Chandy cannot leave Kuwait unless he produces Mohanan in the court or pays up Mohanan's KD50,000 share of the allegedly defrauded money along with its interest, which would come to Rs 9 million.

When contacted for a reaction, Mohanan who now lives in Kerala was evasive and claimed that all that he did was "to help salvage the school" and parried the question on why he did not cooperate with the Kuwaiti investigators and help free his friends from the legal tangle.

Mohanan fled Kuwait when the scandal broke while Nair, better known for his novels in Malayalam which he writes under the pen-name Mohanan Chandran, left the Gulf country earlier. The latter is reportedly building a shopping complex in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. He has not been assigned a diplomatic post in the last two years as the External Affairs Ministry has not given him a new posting.

The arrest of Thomas Chandy, who is credited with political ambitions and is a known financier of the Congress party, has been welcomed by the new managing committee of the 40-year-old school and the school's Council of Elders consisting of Babu Thumpamon, K.T.V. Ramakrishnan and Punnose Padickal as also several social activists.

Chandy fell into the police net on his return to Kuwait after a sojourn in Kerala. Mohanan cannot be formally extradited from India in the absence of an extradition treaty between the two countries. However, according to Babu Thumpamon, the Kuwaiti authorities have sought Interpol's help to track him down.

In one instance of misappropriation established by the Kuwaiti investigators, ambassador Nair is accused of allegedly transferring school funds KD1114,481 (Rs160 million) and its compound interest from 1990 to 1998 to the private accounts of Mathew Philip, Mohanan and S.Z. Shah, a Gulf-based businessman, who was treasurer of the Ad Hoc Committee formed by the ambassador.

In June 1998, Mohanan opened an account with the Bank of Kuwait and the Middle East (BKME) to deposit the transferred funds. It is said to have subsequently become the mother account for various other dealings.

It was from this account that Mohanan transferred KD 32,500 to Mathew Philip's account. It is alleged that Ambassador Nair and First Secretary Sanjeev Kumar received KD30,000 and KD20,000 respectively in cash from Mohanan's withdrawal of KD50,000 from his account.

According to Babu Thumpamon, "the Kuwaiti investigators have found that the Nair-Mathew Philip-Mohanan axis made out documents showing a payment of KD350, 000 to the then sponsor of the school Hind Al Naqueeb, by the school committee". The Parent and Teachers Association says she had only asked the committee to provide a bond of KD100,000 to cover any future loss or damages.