Already, the issue has paralysed Parliament, with the opposition boycotting the winter session, refusing to relent in its demand for a JPC probe. The government, wary of finding itself effectively in a minority and crucially dependent on troublesome small parties if a JPC is constituted, has been holding out in a bloody battle of nerves. And even as new telecom minister Kapil Sibal did some loud thinking on ways to limit the damage with a new policy, the bloodletting spilled over to a new front late in the week as industrialist and Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar engaged Ratan Tata and his telecom firm in a public verbal duel. Parallelly, the buzz going around was the name of another Union minister is likely to surface as a beneficiary of the scam.
Then, on December 8, came the CBI raids in Delhi and Chennai on the houses and offices of Raja, his aides and associates—lending focus and urgency to the jumble of events. Among those raided was M. Sadiq Batcha, managing director of Greenhouse Promoters Pvt Ltd, a Chennai-based company in which Raja’s relatives are believed to have held senior positions. Batcha and his firm are thought to have had a role in laundering the spectrum scam money—the trail linking Batcha’s firm to Raja’s relatives is what the CBI will be specially interested in.
Also under the scanner are a series of companies thought to be fronts for Raja’s bank accounts/deposits in Malaysia. “Searches have been made at 14 places and incriminating documents recovered. The searches are still on,” said Binita Thakur, a CBI deputy inspector general. The agency is learnt to have laid its hands on diaries and documents—if they yield solid, irrefutable evidence, it will open a can of worms for the DMK and put serious pressure on its alliance with the Congress in the state and at the Centre.
One question being asked is, did the raids come too late? The CBI filed the fir in the 2G spectrum allocation case on October 21, 2009. The raids came after 14 months. Initially, the CBI was looking into how “certain officials of the department of telecom entered into a criminal conspiracy with private persons/companies and misused their official position in the grant of Unified Access Service Licence”.
The case primarily looks at the ways in which gains could have been made by several companies, especially when the dates for allocation of spectrum (the scarce frequency ranges used for telecommunications) were suddenly advanced, presumably to benefit them. The CBI believes “certain officials had selectively leaked the information to some applicants regarding the date of issuance of letter of intent”. This meant that in a first-come-first-serve basis allocation, a chosen few bidders (some of them with no background in telecom) made a killing. They later sold the spectrum at massive profits. Part of the money that was made went as kickbacks.