Even as textiles minister Dayanidhi Maran said he had slapped a legal notice on the Tehelka magazine for a "blatant concocted lie" of favouring Malaysian firm Maxis Communication when he was telecom minister, the Bharatiya Janata Party on Tuesday flung four posers at him on his family firms' financial relations with the firm.

The questions are necessary as "the UPA's cupboard of corruption is overflowing and more skeletons are dying to come up", BJP spokesman Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters here. He said the prime minister will have to also clarify as he had okayed during Maran's tenure to shift the spectrum pricing from the Group of Ministers (GoM) to the Department of Telecom (DoT) that later led to the biggest scam of his successor A Raja.

Prasad wanted to know from Maran whether Maxis, which owns 74 percent stakes in Aircel, had invested in Sun DTH Direct or any other family company, whether the investment done through its subsidiary Astro Group of Companies, whether the investment done before or after acquiring Aircel equity and is it not a case of conflict of interest.

Maran was telecom minister from 2004 to 2007 and as such any investment by a company that got 2G licence from him in his family-held companies falls in not only the category of conflict of interest but also amounts to corruption, Prasad asserted, challenging him to prove otherwise with documents that no investments were made by Maxis in the Sun group.

He, however, refused to go into the details or comment on the Tehelka expose until Maran responds.

Tehelka has reported that Maran, grand nephew of DMK supremo M Karunanidhi, had deliberately delayed licence to Aircel in 2006 and forced it to strike a deal with Maxis. The magazine on Tuesday said it had not yet received any legal notice from Maran, dubbing it as "merely an intimidation" and "crony tacticism that is crippling the nation".