A close friend of Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor, Sunanda Pushkar has been seen with him at various social events in the recent past. She has, in fact, been introduced several times as Tharoor's "friend from Canada". Tharoor has acknowledged that he knows her very well. (Read: I am not a proxy for Tharoor: Sunanda Pushkar). There is growing speculation that she's engaged to the junior Foreign Minister but there has been no official confirmation of that yet.
Sunanda, who is in her 40s, runs a spa in Dubai. She also holds an executive's post with an infrastructure company owned by the Emirate government. She has also worked with advertising firms, a travel agency in Dubai as well as with an IT firm in Toronto. She belongs to Sopore in the Kashmir Valley and her father is a retired Lt Colonel.Sunanda Pushkar is at the centre of the Kochi IPL franchise storm. There are allegations that Tharoor used her as a front to collect Rs 70 crores for helping the Kochi owners get their IPL team. Rendezvous Sports World leads the consortium that bought the Kochi team.
The group has offered a staunch defense of its decision to give away equity worth Rs 70 crores to Pushkar. It says that she is a Sales and Marketing Expert who knows the Kerala and Middle East market well and deserves to be rewarded for the expertise she offers to the consortium. Latest updates
(18th April)
In what was seen as a last-ditch effort to save Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor from getting the sack, Sunanda Pushkar, his executive friend said in a statement, that was read out in Dubai by her lawyer Ashish Mehta, that she was “deeply distressed at the vile and malicious reporting of recent days surrounding her role in Rendezvous, the successful bidders for the Kerala IPL team.
(23rd April)
A day after he quit as minister, Tharoor gave a statement in Lok Sabha where he again claimed innocence. "My conscience is clear and I know I have done nothing improper or unethical, leave alone illegal," he said. He said he quit as he did not want to be an embarrassment to the government and the Congress, implying he had not been sacked.
