Former telecom minister and senior BJP leader Arun Shourie, who claims to have apprised prime minister Manmohan Singh about the irregularities in the allotment of 2G licenses 18 months ago, has been asked to appear before the Central Bureau of Investigation.
Former telecom minister and senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Arun Shourie, who claims to have apprised prime minister (PM) Manmohan Singh about the irregularities in the allotment of 2G licenses 18 months ago, has been asked to appear before the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on February 21.
The investigating agency will seek information from him on the 2G spectrum allocation scam.
“We approached Shourie in connection with the preliminary enquiry (PE) registered by the agency following orders by the Supreme Court,” a CBI official said.
“The PE was registered against unknown people with the aim of ascertaining whether or not the first-come-first-served provision passed by the then cabinet led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee was followed.”
In its report, the Shivraj Patil committee has said that the first-come-first-served policy was approved in 2001 when Shourie was telecom minister in the NDA government.
The policy was used in 2003 against multi-bidding for new licenses that year, overlooking telecom regulator TRAI’s recommendations.
Shourie has dismissed the report as ‘fabricated’ and said he even provided substantive proof to the PM in 2009 over the irregularities in awarding the 2G licenses.
He has even claimed to have introduced a vital source, who is in the know of everything related to the scam, to the CBI. The BJP leader also said he had told Singh about his willingness to the meet the PM’s principal secretary, TKA Nair, to pass on more information.
Shourie told the PM that he had details of the front companies of sacked telecom minister A Raja.
Shourie alleges he was promised a meeting with Nair in August/September 2009, but nobody called him later. He also claims to have met the CBI director in October 2009 and handed over documents and names of bureaucrats, who were contacted by the agency. Shourie was telecom minister between January 2003 and May 2004 during the NDA regime.
The Comptroller and Auditor General has estimated a Rs1.76 lakh crore loss to the exchequer due to the sale of spectrum by Raja in January 2008.
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