Anil Ambani profited the most from 2G scam !!

Many corporate houses booked windfall profits from the 2G spectrum scandal, it has now come to light.

The opposition continued to stall both houses of Parliament on Thursday, demanding a Joint Parliamentary Committee investigation into the scandal, but elsewhere, questions were being asked about businessmen who made money from ousted telecom minister A Raja’s scandalous deals.

The CAG report tabled in Parliament earlier this week said Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group benefited the most from improper allocation of licences. The Hindu reported:

The CAG has found that Mr. Ambani’s companies were given undue advantage over other players in at least three ways: first, the fact that Swan Telecom (now Etisalat DB Telecom), one of the 2G beneficiaries, appeared to have been acting as a front company for ADAG’s Reliance Telecom was ignored by the Department of Telecom; second, it got the spectrum before others in the queue; and third, Reliance Communications was favoured in the spectrum allocation while getting access to a dual technology licence for offering both CDMA and GSM services…

The CAG also pointed out that the e-mail address of the corporate as well as registered office of Swan Telecom Pvt. Ltd was shown as hari.nair@relianceada.com, and the same e-mail ID was also given for the correspondence address and the authorised contact person of the applicant company.

Meanwhile, pressure is mounting on Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to explain why he looked the other way when Raja was signing away the nation’s wealth for a pittance. BJP leader L K Advani said the Supreme Court had, for the first time, pointed fingers at a prime minister, and it was high time Singh made a statement.

On television, Subramaniam Swamy, president of the Janata Party, said Singh was not corrupt but weak. Swamy has filed a case in the Supreme Court against Raja’s deals. He spoke to reporters in front of the Supreme Court on Thursday, and asked why Singh had remained unresponsive to his plea for permission to proceed against Raja. He alleged the government was “embroidering the truth”.

Gopikrishnan, whose hard work as a reporter led to the unearthing of the scandal, believes telecom licences issued illegally will eventually be cancelled. Chandan Mitra, editor of The Pioneer, praised Gopikrishnan and revealed how he had grown into a reporter with a formidable reputation for digging out hidden information.

I don’t know how much pressure he came under and from which quarters. But I faced more pressure over these reports than anything else in my 27 years of journalism, of which nearly 20 have been spent in senior editorial positions. I am proud to have withstood them. But even more proud that I gave a dynamic young man from Kerala a break in the national media, a break he used to do the nation a sterling service. J Gopikrishnan has made history and The Pioneer basks in his achievement.

In an interview Mitra ran with his article, titled The Man Who Felled a King, Gopikrishnan reveals that a whistleblower within the telecom ministry helped him unravel the complexities of the scandal.

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