New Delhi: Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has extended his support to Union Home Minister P Chidambaram over the Finance Ministry note suggesting that the latter could have prevented the 2G scam.
Singh on Wednesday night called Chidambaram and said that he had full faith in the integrity of the former finance minister.
Confirming the reports, Chidambaram issued a statement on Thursday, saying that the Prime Minister had given him a call from Frankfurt.
He further said, “I have assured the Prime Minister that I shall not make any public statement on the subject until he returns to India,” adding that Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee also spoke to him from Washington.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister also discussed the issue with Mukherjee.
According to sources, the Prime Minister had counseled Chidambaram to be patient till he returns home from New York on September 27.
The "secret" note was not shown to him, Singh is believed to have told Chidambaram, who was the Finance Minister during 2G spectrum allocation.
The March 25, 2011 document on allocation and pricing of 2G spectrum broadly suggests that Chidambaram could have insisted that the valuable resource could have been auctioned at the time the spectrum was sold on a first-come-first-serve basis by former telecom minister A Raja, now behind bars.
The note submitted to the Supreme Court on Wednesday was written by PGS Rao, Deputy Director in the Finance Ministry, to Vini Mahajan, Joint Secretary in the PMO.
The covering letter to the note also said that Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee had seen the note.
(With Additional Inputs from PTI)
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