New York:
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee today refused to comment on a note sent by his ministry to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the 2G spectrum scam. He said he cannot make any remark on the matter as is it is "subjudice".
"The matter is subjudice. I cannot make any comment on it. The whole matter is under the scrutiny of the Supreme Court of India. We cannot make any comment on any matter that is sub judice," Mukherjee, who is in New York to attend an India-US investor forum, said.
Separately, while addressing Indian and American business leaders at a high-profile USIBC roundtable, Mukherjee said the Finance Ministry note to the Prime Minister's Secretariat is out in the open only due to the Right to Information Act, which is one of the many steps the government has taken to flush out corruption and make governance transparent and accountable.
He said in the recent years, lot of authority has been given to the people of India through the RTI.
"In fact today a sensational news item has come and it is through the exercise of the RTI. A note was sent by Minister of Finance to Prime Minister. Somebody demanded through the use of RTI to have the copy of that note from the Prime Minister's Secretariat and... fact of the matter is somebody has produced that as a piece of evidence in a particular case," Mukherjee said.
He said whether the letter can be used in such a manner or not "is a different story."
The 14-page note, prepared by a senior bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry and sanctioned by Mr Mukherjee, suggests that Mr Chidambaram did not do enough to prevent the swindle when he was Finance Minister in 2008. The note relies heavily on technicalities, says Mr Chidambaram could have "stuck to the stand" of an auction of highly-valuable spectrum, and delivers to the Opposition the windfall of two of the government's senior-most ministers at war.