A Delhi court on Thursday allowed the income tax department to interrogate six accused, including former telecom minister A Raja , arrested for their alleged involvement in the 2G scam.

The 2G trial also kicked off on Thursday with public prosecutor making opening statement, in which he accused Swan of being a front for Reliance and also added that both Swan and Unitech were beneficiaries of the policy changes made by Raja.

The Special CBI court permitted the I-T officials to question Raja, Swan Telecom promoters Shahid Balwa and Vinod Goenka and three senior executives from Reliance ADA Group - Gautam Doshi, Hari Nair and Surendra Pipara - from July 27-29. The I-T authorities filed three separate applications in the court on Thursday to examine the accused on income and investments made by them and their companies, senior standing counsel for the I-T department Sanjeev Rajpal said.

The first application deals with questioning Raja regarding his family income and a team from Trichy is expected to examine him, an official with the direct knowledge of developments said. I-T officials from Mumbai will question Balwa regarding Etisalat DB on shareholding pattern in Tiger Trustees and Mauritius-based Delphi Investments , which is completely owned by Mavi Investments , the official added.

Meanwhile, the third application moved by the additional commissioner of income tax, Mumbai, asked to question Balwa, Goenka and three ADA Group executives. Previously, the CBI court had allowed the probe agency to interrogate Raja, former telecom secretary Siddharth Behura and Gautam Doshi in confinement at the court complex for an hour each on July 18.

The CBI also began framing charges against the accused that included violation of first-come-first-serve policy, significance of advancing the cut-off date of applications for licences, allocation of 2G licences, approval of dual-technology licences and allocation of spectrum, ineligibility of companies and cheating the government exchequer by not revising the entry fee. CBI, in its first charge sheet on April 2, had accused Raja, and eight other persons including Balwa, Goenka, Doshi, Nair and Pipara as well as three companies of causing a loss of 30,984 crore to the exchequer. (Economic Times)