No FIR against Radia despite raid hype

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) raided residence and offices of corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and interrogated her, but it could not make out any case to register an FIR (first information report) against her to proceed further.

Even the tapes of hundreds of her telephonic conversations yielding nothing incriminating to put her in the dock. Officials trying to establish her role in the 2G spectrum allocation scam found that all her calls appear to be boasts to show off how good her public relation is and nothing more. The CBI was under the Supreme Court's direction to raid her to look for any possible evidences in the scam. The court is monitoring the probe and wanted the agency to examine the tapes and that examination led to raids on Radia's permises, the sources said.

They said the CBI has, however, not yet given up on Radia's role in the telecom licences granted at the throwaway price at the 2001 rates by the resigned telecom minister A Raja as she happened to be his close friend as it falls from various tapes examined.

It may be noted that the CBI had conducted simultaneous raids on a single day on the premises of Raja and relatives and friends, Radia and Pradeep Baijal, a retired Telecom Regulatory Authority of India ( TRAI) chief who is now working with her company.

WHY TAPES USELESS:

And, it fell on Tata Group chairman Ratan Tata to point out in his latest affidavit filed before the Supreme Court on Saturday that nothing incriminating about the 2G licences can be found in her tapes as they are recordings done much after the spectrum allocation was completed.

He points out that the licences were allotted from October 2007 to January 10, 2008, while the tapping of Radia's calls happened only from August 20, 2008 in two phases, first up to December 19, 2008 and another from May 11 to July 9, 2009.

Tata's latest affidavit in response to the government's stand on his writ petition filed last month says he was fighting not to block publication of the tapes but to redress " wholesale violation of the constitutional rights of a large number of persons" by the indiscriminate publication of the tapes. He has blasted the government for " standing by and allowing purloined material of this kind to be freely distributed and published without taking any steps or actions to retrieve the stored material or find out the source of the leakage."

MEDIA HOUSES:

The sensational part of the Saturday affidavit is the direct charge levelled on three big corporate houses owning substantial stakes in media groups as he says the media's right to broadcast or publish these tapes has to be evaluated against the invasion of the right to privacy as he dubbed it as " euphemism for waging surrogate corporate war." The corporate houses attacked by Tata are Anil Ambani's Reliance Capital having 10 per cent share in the TV Today Network running Aajtak, Headlines Today, and RPG and the Rajan Raheja Group owning Delhi magazines Open and Outlook respectively that were the first to put the Radia tapes in public domain.

Tata has asserted in the affidavit that almost all the tapes in public domain have contents that are nothing more than loose comments or gossip about third parties and some private conversations. The tapes included his conversations with Radia for handling the PR work of his companies.