Reliance team meets CAG officials

I / Mumbai July 12, 2011, 12:54 IST

Executives of Reliance Industries (RIL) today held a lengthy meeting with Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) officials on its showpiece KG-D6 gas fields during the Exit Conference the top auditor held as prelude to finalising its report.

RIL executive director PMS Prasad led a team that took almost 100 minutes to reply to observations CAG made in its draft report.

Prasad did not take questions from media after the meeting.

Cairn India and BG Group of UK followed RIL in clarifying to any query the CAG had.

CAG is holding Exit Conference with private firms and the oil ministry prior to finalising its audit report on Reliance's KG-D6 gas field, Cairn's Rajasthan oil block and BG's Panna-Mukta and Tapti oil and gas fields.

It had separate sessions with three operators in the forenoon and with the oil ministry post lunch.

RIL, under scrutiny of the CAG, has sent a point-by-point reply to a draft CAG report on its D6 field.

In a voluminous reply comprising more than 230 pages, the country’s largest private sector company is critical of the CAG approach, terming it “erroneous” in concluding that an expense incurred by it is not warranted.

“To leap to an opinion that an expense considered unwise is, for that reason, dishonest or that a practice which is considered unsatisfactory is necessarily dishonest is clearly erroneous,” an RIL letter to the government and the auditor said.

In its draft report last month, CAG said RIL was shown undue favour by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and the Directorate General of Hydrocarbons (DGH) in its Krishna-Godavari basin D6 block, causing big loss to the exchequer.