NEW DELHI: India’s prime minister on Saturday denied accusations of inaction in a 40-billion-dollar telecoms scandal and promised that anyone found guilty of wrongdoing in the case would be punished.
Manmohan Singh is accused of failing to probe allegations that his telecoms minister sold second-generation (2G) mobile phone licences for a fraction of their value in 2008.
The scandal is seen by Indian commentators as the most serious crisis to be faced by the Congress-led government in the six years since it first took office and could potentially be the country’s biggest corruption scandal.
“There should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that if any wrong thing has been done by anybody he or she or will be brought to book,” Singh said in his first public statement on the accusations.
“We need to deal effectively with the threats of corruption,” he told a leadership forum in New Delhi. While there is no suggestion Singh profited from the 2G spectrum allocation, his reputation as the “Mr Clean” of politics has been put into question, analysts say.
The firestorm was ignited earlier in the week when India’s chief auditing body declared the sale of 2G telecom licences at far below their market value lost the country up to 40 billion dollars.
