No decision on 2G scam till PM comes back to India, says Khurshid

New Delhi, Sep 27 (ANI): Union Law and Justice Minister Salman Khurshid has said the talks over 2G scam would not proceed until Prime Minister Manmohan Singh returns home from New York.

Talking to reporters here after meeting Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee, Khurshid said: ""Many things are in my mind and he (Mukherjee) is our senior leader and I seek his advice but I think this matter will not be taken up till Prime Minister comes."

Khurshid, who was accompanied by Minister of State in Prime Minister's Office (PMO) V Narayanswamy met Mukherjee late on Monday night at his residence.

This visit by both the ministers has been viewed as one of significance considering the raging row over the telecom scam in which a particular inter-ministerial communication has been interpreted to confirm the role of Chidambaram in the scam when he was the Finance Minister.

Meanwhile Narayanswamy said that he didn't discuss anything in regard to 2G-spectrums allocation scam and his visit to Mukherjee was merely a courtesy call.

"No meeting, nothing, normally I come to meet Dada (Pranab Mukherjee) all the time, whenever he is Delhi, I used to come and that is why I have come here, I come only this time, he is always available to me at night, no I have nothing to do with that," he added.

It may be recalled that Chidambaram came under fire after a 14-page note, prepared by a senior bureaucrat in the Finance Ministry and seen by Pranab Mukherjee, suggested that Chidambaram could have acted more stridently in 2008 on the spectrum pricing issue, when he was the country's Finance Minister.

The note, which relied heavily on technicalities; says Chidambaram could have "stuck to the stand" of an auction of the highly valuable spectrum.

The note came into the public domain under the Right to Information (RTI) Act petition filed by Vivek Garg, a prominent activist.

Both Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee had met Congress President Sonia Gandhi separately yesterday. Sonia Gandhi was reported to have taken steps to defuse the controversy.

The telecom scam, one of India's biggest graft cases ever, may have cost 39.57 billion dollars in revenue to the public exchequer as per the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG). (ANI)