Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's additional private secretary C M Raveendran, who was required to appear before Enforcement Directorate on Friday in connection with the gold smuggling case, got himself admitted to hospital for what he claimed as post-Covid treatment. On the previous occasion, when he was summoned for deposition, he informed ED that he was down with Covid. He was served a second notice by ED following his reported discharge from hospital and a further period of observation.

Raveendran is doing exactly what M Sivasankar, the CM’s former principal secretary, had done when ED had made a move to arrest him. The senior bureaucrat, under suspension from the CM’s office, complained of sudden illness when he was being escorted to the ED office in Kochi and asked that he be admitted to a private hospital in the state capital, where, it turned out that his wife was practising as a doctor. When medical tests on him showed that he had no heart problems, as he had complained, Sivasankar claimed that he had serious back pain problems, for which he was admitted to the government medical college hospital.

But after performing certain tests on him, the hospital discharged him, saying that he had only routine back problems. But the wily Sivasankar got himself admitted himself in an ayurvedic hospital, although the investigating agencies caught up with him and arrested him from the hospital.

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