New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday began hearing the plea for investigating the alleged role of Home Minister P Chidambaram in the 2G spectrum scam with an NGO claiming that he was in the know of all developments relating to fixation of price for allocation of radio waves.
The bench of justices GS Singhvi and S Radhakrishana, which was reconstituted after the retirement of Justice AK Ganguly, took up the plea of an NGO, which approached the apex court after the trial court had given a clean chit to Chidambaram. The Court also directed CBI, Enforcement Directorate and Income Tax department to file a status report to update it on their probe in the 2G spectrum allocation case within three weeks.
The application filed by an NGO, Centre for Public Interest Litigation (CPIL), submitted that a ‘thorough investigation’ was required to probe the role of Chidambaram, who was the Finance Minister when spectrum was allocated to telecom companies during the tenure of former Telecom Minister A Raja in 2008.
A similar petition has also been filed by the Janata Party chief Subramanian Swamy which would also be taken up by the court.
The NGO, on whose plea the apex court is monitoring the probe in the scam, contended that there is evidence showing that Chidambaram was ‘micromanaging everything and was keeping a close eye on all developments’ on the spectrum allocation.
The petitioner annexed a series of documents and media reports to substantiate its claim about the alleged involvement of Chidambaram in the scam.
Advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing for the CPIL, submitted that Chidambaram was very much aware of the decision taken by Raja and he was also involved in the issue of fixing price for 2G spectrum.
He said the alleged role of Chidambaram was needed to be probed as documents suggested that the spectrum should have been sold through auction or the price should have been fixed three-and-half times more than that of the 2001 rate which was overruled by Raja. (PTI)