BJP, Cong spar over ‘help’ extended to Vijay Mallya

NEW DELHI: Former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former finance minister P Chidambaram on Monday rejected BJP’S allegation that they had favoured industrialist Vijay Mallya in getting loans.

The two senior Congress leaders said that the letters from the former liquor baron were among the hundreds of letters routinely received by the then UPA government.

Citing several letters written by Mallya to both Manmohan and Chidambaram, Bharatiya Janata Party spokesperson Sambit Patra alleged that the two had helped the industrialist obtain huge loans for bailing out the nowdefunct Kingfisher Airlines.

Rejecting the allegation, the Congress instead pointed fingers at the BJP and the Narendra Modi government over waiver of loans to Mallya and over him fleeing the country.

“All Prime Ministers and other ministers in any government, receive representations from various captains of industry which we, in the normal course, pass on to the appropriate authority. This is what I have done and done with full satisfaction that we were not doing anything which was against the law of the land,” Manmohan Singh told reporters. “The letter(s) being talked about, is nothing else but an ordinary piece of letter which any government in my position would have dealt with. It was a routine transaction,” he said while responding to Patra’s allegations.

Regarding Patra’s claims that Manmohan Singh had asked his then Principal Secretary to “ensure help” to Mallya, Chidambaram said forwarding letters addressed to the Prime Minister’s Office or other ministries to the officer concerned was a routine affair.