PC Shoots The Sheriff

Chidambaram’s comment seemed strange for Anil had hurled pertinent allegations, including the fact that there was a politico-corporate nexus in the case of Reliance Infocomm, especially with former telecom minister Pramod Mahajan. Apart from this, he had raised issues of corporate governance—that RIL had acted against the interests of its shareholders in its financial and commercial transactions with Reliance Infocomm. Not to forget that he had asked sebi to investigate whether the RIL scrip had been manipulated by interested parties during the seven-month-long battle between the two Ambani brothers.

But maybe the FM’s logic wasn’t surprising. In the recent past, he had invariably come out in Reliance’s support each time there was a feeling that the government was thinking seriously about looking at Anil’s charges. In May this year, both the sebi chairman and the minister for company affairs publicly said they were investigating complaints against the Reliance group. They both backtracked once Chidambaram denied it. The same had happened earlier during the Ambani fight. All this raises an important question: whose side is Chidambaram on—Reliance or the law?