Excise minister Mopidevi Venkata Ramana will appear before the CBI on Wednesday to explain the alleged large-scale irregularities in the Vanpic deal that boasted of constructing two ports in Guntur and Prakasam districts and an industrial corridor between both the districts with the help of the state of Ras Al Khaimah, an emirate of the UAE.

Ramana was the minister for ports when the Vanpic deal was inked.

The probe agency has already quizzed him once on the Vanpic deal.

After ascertaining certain key information from Nimmagadda Prasad, the promoter of the project, and his associates including bureaucrat K V Brahmananda Reddy and Navayuga engineering group chairman C Visweswara Rao, the CBI is now readying itself to quiz the minister armed with the fresh inputs.

The CBI has charged Nimmagadda with providing 65% stake in the construction of port project through the back-door method.

Entities like Navayuga otherwise would have had to compete in the open bidding process to gain such huge contracts, the CBI said.

Meanwhile, the CBI court on Tuesday returned to the investigation agency the third chargesheet it had filed in the Jagan assets case citing certain technical mistakes and asked the agency to submit it again after rectifying the same.

The court also permitted the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to take copies of the supplementary chargesheet and other relevant documents the CBI filed against Y Srilakshmi, the IAS officer who is currently in jail, as an accused in the illegal mining case.