Lower court to decide PC’s fate

The Supreme Court on Thursday left it to a lower court to decide on Janata Party chief Subramanian Swamy’s plea to probe home minister P Chidambaram’s alleged role in the 2G spectrum allocation scam.

The Supreme Court on Thursday left it to a lower court to decide on Janata Party chief Subramanian Swamy’s plea to probe home minister P Chidambaram’s alleged role in the 2G spectrum allocation scam.

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Delhi special judge OP Saini, who is trying the 2G spectrum scam-related cases, already reserved his order after hearing Swamy’s arguments and is expected to decide the issue on Saturday.

On Thursday, a bench of Justice GS Singhvi and justice and AK Ganguly rejected the plea for a CBI probe into the role of Chidambaram, who was finance minister in January 2008 when telecom minister A Raja had allocated spectrum.

The bench said since Swamy’s complaint was pending before a CBI judge, “we do not consider it proper to entertain his prayer for issue of a mandate to the CBI to investigate Chidambaram".

It gave two weeks to the trial judge to decide the matter without being influenced by the apex court verdict.

In his complaint, Swamy alleged that Chidambaram as finance minister had a role in fixing the prices of the licences and in the dilution of shares by the telecom firms to two foreign companies.

He alleged there was enough evidence on record to show that the pricing decision was taken jointly by Chidambaram and Raja.