Another CAG report hurts Prime Minister's office

Even as officials of the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s PMO keep fighting the fires lit by the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General in the 2G spectrum allocation scam, yet another purportedly leaked report from the national auditor is hurting them badly.

This time the issue is the appointment of the already jailed Congress MP Suresh Kalmadi as the chairman of the Commonwealth Games Organising Committee.

In a bid to ward off the heat, Union sports minister Ajay Maken made a suo motu statement in the Lok Sabha and made a valiant bid to pass the buck to the NDA government.

The sum and substance of his argument was that Kalmadi’s appointment had been finalised by the Vajpayee government through a contract and even though reservations were expressed by successive sports ministers, the government had no option.

“We had to either scrap the games or go with the contract, there was no third option,” Maken told reporters. The contract gave Kalmadi the powers to run the Games as his personal fiefdom and spend Rs2,000 crore in the process.

However, Maken’s explanation did not cut much ice with the BJP and leader of opposition Arun Jaitley charged that like in the 2G scam, the PMO was once again trying to keep an ‘arm’s length’ from this controversy.