Raja diaries rip open an ugly nexus

Cynics had every reason to smirk at Wednesday’s raids on A Raja, coming as it was a year after the filing of an FIR against him as telecom minister. But on Thursday, it emerged that Raja’s personal diaries, confiscated during the searches in Delhi and Tamil Nadu, could lead the CBI to several murky money trails and rip open a nexus bet­ween politicians, bureaucrats, journalists and the corporate world.

Top government sources said the three diaries crammed in Tamil and English contains a large number of business details along with the names of pertinent people from 2003 to ’10. A peep into it shows the prospect of finding leads to several money trails that went into making the multi-crore 2G spectrum scam.
“Erasing all the financial trails from banks, companies and personal records is an impossible task. The diaries can give us many leads and later serve as an evidence,” said an official. The jottings have made the case stronger for the CBI to interrogate Raja, whose questioning “is now very much on the cards”.
CBI sources confided that interrogation of Raja’s close aides, whose premises too were raided on Wednesday, was under progress and their statements were being recorded. “We have got hold of some revealing details and information, said a source, adding, “a lot of incriminating documents were recovered”.
Several teams of CBI had simultaneously conducted 14 raids in the national capital and Chennai besides Raja’s Perambalur house in central Tamil Nadu on Wednesday.
Sources said it was a high-level committee headed by Union Home Secretary G K Pillai that gave the green signal to raid Raja’s premises, including his official residence at Motilal Nehru Marg in central Delhi. The other members of the committee, which was constituted at the initiation of the Prime Minister to look into politician-bureaucrat and others nexus, are secretaries in the department of Revenue and DoPT, besides RAW and director, IB.
Topics:A Raja, 2G spectrum, CBI