The CBI, which is probing possible criminal aspects, if any, in the allotment of spectrum licences since 2001, will question former communications minister Arun Shourie here later this month.
Sources said the agency had approached Mr Shourie last week, asking him to appear before it in connection with the preliminary enquiry (PE) it had registered on a direction from the Supreme Court.
“The PE (against ‘unknown persons’) was registered to ascertain whether the ‘first-come-first-served’ provision (mandated by the Atal Behari Vajpayee NDA government, in which Mr Shourie was a minister) for granting spectrum licences was followed by predecessors of former minister A. Raja,” the sources said. The CBI is also scrutinising documents of all companies awarded licences after 2001, the sources added.
The CBI is expected to examine the minutes of meetings held by successive communications ministers, including the late Pramod Mahajan, Mr Shourie and Dayanidhi Maran. Mr Shourie is learnt to have conveyed to the agency that he would appear before it on February 21 after returning from a trip to Kolkata.
The sources said the CBI is also likely to convert one of the PEs it had registered in connection with the 2G spectrum scam, involving officials of public sector banks, into a regular case. The CBI is also probing the role of certain officials of the department of telecommunications who allegedly signed the bank loan papers of some private telecom companies in the race for 2G allotment. Some of these PSU bank officials might be booked in this connection.
n More Radia tapes?: More tape recordings of top lobbyist Niira Radia’s conversations with corporate leaders and some media figures are expected to be out in the public domain soon, sources said. Around 800 new conversations involving Ms Radia and others were made public recently. It is believed that more conversations, which are part of the over 5,800 conversations now in the Supreme Court’s custody, might be made public.
Central agencies have also started scrutinising the call and message details of Ms Radia in connection with their investigations into her alleged links with certain foreign intelligence agencies. In an affidavit filed in the Supreme Court on December 10, 2010, the government had revealed that its probe against Ms Radia had started in 2007 following a complaint made to the finance ministry which cited her alleged links to foreign agencies.