The Congress party upped the ante by blaming Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for tardiness in investigation into Swiss Bank accounts of stock broker Ketan Parekh, indicted by the Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC) as the key player in last year’s stock market scam.Congress MP and JPC member Mani Shankar Aiyar said, “The PM is responsible for the tardy action by the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is under him. The JPC found the work of CBI to be shocking.”Former Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha also continues to be under attack. “To heap all the blame on the then finance secretary (Ajit Kumar) is to encourage a damaging culture of shifting blame downwards. JPC chairman P. M. Tripathi has deliberately breached my trust by promising to remove the name of Kumar and then retaining it,” said Aiyar. He has been charged by the Opposition for misleading the Rajya Sabha about the Calcutta Stock Exchange (CSE) payout crisis, Unit Trust of India (UTI) affairs and irresponsibility for not implementing the recommendations of the earlier JPC which could have ‘pre-empted/moderated the scam’.“When the JPC inquired of Sinha on implementation issues, it was told that he did not imagine that the recommendations of the earlier JPC were not implemented. Is this responsible behaviour? Or is he a poet whose task is to imagine instead of checking facts as a minister,” was Aiyar’s take on the subject. On CSE payment crisis, Aiyar accused Sinha of misleading Parliament by his assurances in the Rajya Sabha that there was no payment crisis in CSE and the Settlement Guarantee Fund (SGF) had enough resources to meet any likely contingency. “Even the smallest market operator could see the red alerts,” Aiyar claimed. Quoting reports, he said, UTI had to bail out CSE by picking up 25 lakh dud shares of DSQ Software, simultaneously Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) clearing house had intervened to stop payment of MMCB (Madhavpura Mercantile Cooperative Bank) payorders discounted at the BSE branch of Bank of India (BoI). The Automated Lending and Borrowing Mechanism of National Stock Exchange (NSE) also went bust because Reliance Stockbroking Limited did not redeploy nearly Rs 2,000 crore. “It was the case of HIV-positive turning into AIDS and Doctor Sinha said it is a case of influenza,” Aiyar said.Sinha has been charged with misleading Parliament on UTI issue as well, as he told the Rajya Sabha that P.S. Subramanyam, former UTI chairman, had been sacked because he had deliberately kept him in the dark. “In a Sherlock Holmes kind of an investigation, the JPC has recounted (para 17.19—17.21 of the report) that the last recorded contact between UTI and MoF had been on May 18, 2001. Sinha had told JPC that how he had repeatedly told his officers to contact UTI and he was assured that all was hunky-dory,” Aiyar stated.Quoting from the JPC report, Aiyar pointed out that since the US-64 scheme was not subject to the control of Sebi, was not NAV-based, had a large investor base, held a huge stake in the equity market and had been bailed out by SBI earlier, MoF should have been more pro-active.
