)
Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla on Friday met Finance Minister P Chidambaram and discussed the case filed against him by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in connection with alleged irregularities in the allocation of coal blocks to one of his group companies.
He said the company had done no wrong and he was not worried about the case’s fallout on his bank licence application.
“Obviously, I brought this up (issue of First Information Report by CBI) with the finance minister but there are so many other things to talk about. So work goes on. That’s not the only industry we are dealing with. We have so many other industries, so many other things to discuss with the finance minister,” Birla told reporters after meeting Chidambaram.
This was Birla’s first public statement after the CBI lodged a case against him and former coal secretary P C Parakh on charges of criminal conspiracy and abuse of official position in connection with the Rs 1.86-lakh-crore coal block allocation scam this week.
The CBI has alleged that Birla had met Parakh to push the allocation of the Talabira-II coal block in Odisha to Hindalco in 2005.
“As of now, I am not worried about it. There is nothing wrong (that) has been done, so why should one worry?” he said, when asked whether this issue could affect his bank licence application.
Though the news of Birla’s scheduled appointment with Chidambaram was out in the afternoon, the finance ministry and the company tried to keep it a low-key affair and did not divulge any details.
Chidambaram did not comment on his meeting with the tycoon.
His party said the businessman had every right to meet the finance minister. “It’s his right. He is a businessman and he can meet the finance minister. His meeting is not a secret, he is meeting him openly,” Congress spokesperson Renuka Chowdhury said.
Union ministers Anand Sharma, Sachin Pilot, Milind Deora and Manish Tewari have come out in support of Birla.
Asked whether the open support of some ministers for the industrialist was intended to exert pressure on the CBI, Chowdhury said, “What the ministers did was their job. All that they said was that we should not pre-judge a case. After all, there is investor confidence involved.”
Birla did not enter North Block, the headquarters of finance ministry, from Gate No 2, which is usually taken by all visitors and officials. Dressed in a white shirt, he entered from one of the gates of the home ministry, adjacent to the finance ministry. This was perhaps to avoid mediapersons, who had thronged the North Block gate in large numbers.
The veil of secrecy also prevented anyone from seeing the industry tycoon enter the finance minister’s chamber. Perhaps here, too, he entered from an adjacent room. Media persons were waiting in the corridors of the finance minister’s for long to get a comment from Birla, but he was seen only while coming out of Chidambaram’s room. Birla immediately went to meet Revenue Secretary Sumit Bose. Emerging out of the revenue secretary’s room, he responded to some queries from media. Asked about the agenda of his meeting with Bose, he said it was to discuss some other issues.
The Confederation of Indian Industry urged the CBI to exercise caution in the case, saying reputation of institutions and individuals take years to build and a wrong action may jeopardise it.
The coal scam broke after the Comptroller and Auditor General last year suggested that the arbitrary allocation of coalfields might have robbed the exchequer of potential revenues of Rs 1.86 lakh crore between 2004 and 2009. The CBI is looking into allegations of irregularities in coal block allocations to power and steel companies since 1993 in a Supreme Court-monitored investigation.
