CAG Vinod Rai continues to face JPC grilling
20 Dec 2011
The cross-examination of Comptroller and Auditor General of India Vinod Rai was continued today by a joint parliamentary committee looking into the 2G spectrum scandal over his estimate of losses in the cheap and arbitrary allocation of radio waves in 2008.
Recording of Rai's evidence could not be completed on Monday as almost every member of the JPC had questions for him.
Till the time of this report, there were no indications of what transpired at the JPC today.
Rai had earlier stuck to his estimate of a notional loss of Rs176,000 crore to the exchequer in the face of intense questioning from the panel's members, particularly Congress MP Manish Tewari.
Tewari reportedly asked Rai whether there was any single figure of loss estimates on which all the auditors in the CAG's office agreed. He pointed out that two auditors, R P Singh and Subbu R, did not agree with the CAG using the foreign investment attracted by the licensees as a criterion to assess the losses.
The CAG has taken the stand that such questioning is unfair. At one time during yesterday's hour-long meeting, BJP member Ravishankar Prasad is said to have objected to the manner in which Tewari was framing questions to "a senior official like the CAG".
R P Singh, former director-general for audit in the CAG, who appeared before the JPC on 14 November, had maintained that the actual loss was in the region of Rs2,600 crore and estimates like Rs1.76 lakh crore were like a "mathematical guess".
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