Just a day after prime minister Manmohan Singh sought to explain away the controversial 2G spectrum allocations of 2008, it emerges that the finance ministry may not have agreed completely with the conditions of the allotments after all. In what seems contrary to the prime minister's claim in his meeting with the editors of TV channels, a note written by the then finance minister to the prime minister, as reported by the Times of India newspaper on Thursday, takes a different view of the spectrum allocations. While Singh said that he felt there was nothing improper in the companies diluting their equity in order to raise money, the then finance minister P Chidambaram, in his letter to prime minister Manmohan Singh, had suggested that the licensees should be made to share their profits with the government in case they sold their entitlements.

In his defence on Wednesday, the prime minister had said that though he had received several complaints regarding the 2G spectrum allocations he did not find sufficient reasons to intervene in the matter at the time. He had said that besides the telecom ministry the telecom regulator TRAI had given its nod to the allocations as had the telecom commission and the finance ministry. 

As per the Times of India, though, Chidambaram wrote to the prime minister on January 15, 2008. Here's the link to the Times of India story: