By IANS,
New Delhi : The parliamentary Public Accounts Committee (PAC) will submit its report on the controversial 2G spectrum allocation to mobile operators next month, panel chief Murli Manohar Joshi said here Thursday.
At a press conference at Parliament Annexe, Joshi also dismissed suggestions that there was an overlap in the mandates of the PAC with that of the recently-constituted Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) headed by Congress member P.C. Chacko to probe the 2G spectrum scam.
“The PAC is working towards submitting its report in April,” the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader said when asked when the investigation by the panel would be completed.
“There is no overlap between the mandates of PAC and the JPC. PAC is a perpetual committee with wide powers to look into any loss to the exchequer. JPC is for a limited mandate, time and for a specific subject,” he said.
Joshi said the PAC had a constitutional mandate to examine such issues, “whether the Supreme Court or Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) or Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) or Enforcement Directorate (ED) or the JPC” probed them or not.
“Our (PAC) action (on the 2G spectrum allocation) started when there was no CAG audit report. It started during the chairmanship of Jaswant Singh and continued during Gopinath Munde’s tenure and mine,” he said.
The PAC, which is examining the CAG report that pegged the loss in the 2G spectrum scam at Rs.1.76 lakh crore, has so far summoned and heard the depositions from two senior journalists, apart from CBI chief A.P. Singh in the last two months.
Asked if the PAC had decided on summoning Prime Minister Manmohan Singh for a hearing, the BJP leader said the committee was yet to take a decision on this. The summoning of more journalists and celebrities too would be decided later, he added.