Ahead of the Budget session of Parliament, the BJP has dragged former prime minister Manmohan Singh into the Vijay Mallya case, accusing “corrupt hands” of helping the fugitive owner of the defunct Kingfisher Airlines to get huge loans.
The BJP at a press conference on Monday read out correpondence between liquor baron Mallya and Manmohan Singh and his former UPS colleague P Chidambaram to score the political point that the former prime minister took special interest in the survival of the airline. In one of the emails, Mallya thanked Singh for interacting with him and for his former principal secretary T K A Nair pushing his case with the ministries of civil aviation and petroleum to ensure that his airline remained afloat.
Singh later said he “did nothing wrong against the law of the land”. He claimed he treated the representation from Mallya in the normal course, which any minister or government would do. “All PM and other ministers in any government receive representations from various leaders of industry... In normal course, we pass it on to the authorities concerned... What I have done was with full satisfaction that we were not doing anything against the law of the land,” Singh clarified.
BJP spokesperson Samite Patras, who read out a couple of letters he claimed were exchanged between Mallya and the UPS government's top brass, sought to know from Congress chief Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi at whose behest the defaulting company got loans. Patras made a serious charge by saying that another principal secretary to Singh, Pulok Chatterjee, would “snatch files” from the then prime minister to take it to Sonia Gandhi's residence at 10 Janpath.
Published 30 January 2017, 19:54 IST