New Delhi/Chennai, April 25 (IANS) In another major embarrassment for Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M. Karunanidhi, his daughter Kanimozhi was Monday named co-conspirator in the high-profile second generation (2G) telecom spectrum case, in a development that could potentially rock the federal coalition headed by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

 
 The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which had arrested leader of Tamil Nadu's ruling DMK and former federal communications minister A. Raja as the main accused, has now named his party colleague Kanimozhi, a Rajya Sabha member herself, and four others as co-conspirators.
 
 The chargesheet, the second thus far, filed by the premier probe agency in a special court here Monday also names as co-accused Sharad Kumar of Kalaignar TV, Karim Morani of Cineyug Films, and Asif Balwa and Rajiv B. Agarwal of Kusegaon Realty.
 
 "On the basis of material on record, I am satisfied that there is enough incriminating material on record to proceed against the accused persons," said Judge O.P. Saini, who is presiding over the special court of the investigative agency.
 
 He asked Balwa and Agarwal, who are already in judicial custody, to be produced before the court Tuesday, while all the other co-accused are to be present May 6.
 
 "I don’t want to comment now,” Kanimozhi told IANS in Chennai minutes after her name was included in the chargesheet. "I am not even a director in Kalaignar TV," she said, even as the probe agency says she has a 20 percent stake in the TV venture.
 
 The probe agency claims it has unearthed an illegal money trail that moved from Dynamix to Kusegaon and then on to Cineyug, all part of the DB Group that promoted Swan Telecom, ending with Kalaignar TV that gets its name from how Karunanidhi is popularly addressed -- a scholar.
 
 Kanimozhi's stepmother and wife of Karunanidhi, Dayalu Ammal, who is said to own the majority 60-percent stake in Kalaignar TV, did not figure in the charges as had been speculated by a section of the media.
 
 Dayalu Ammal has been named as a witness.
 
 The opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) was quick to comment. "The 60 percent owner of Kalaignar TV, Dayalu Ammal, has not been named. We wonder if there is some political pressure due to which the CBI has hesitated to add name her," a BJP spokesperson said.
 
 The ties between the Congress party, which heads the ruling United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition, and Karunanidhi's DMK, an important partner, have not been particularly smooth ever since Raja was arrested and sent to custody over the spectrum case.
 
 While DMK did not comment, Home Minister P. Chidambaram, who represents the Congress in the Lok Sabha from Sivaganga in Tamil Nadu, also did not wish to react. "I do not wish to react on presumptions," Chidambaram said, before Kanimozhi was formally charged.
 
 But some political commentators said Karunanidhi, who awaits the results of the recent assembly elections in the state, may not rock the federal coalition as yet. "DMK has to digest this," said editor and political analyst Cho Ramaswamy.
 
 "The party cannot afford offending the central government. After all, the DMK needs the support of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh -- the protector of all corruption in India," he told IANS in Chennai with characteristic sarcasm.
 
 The case had taken a serious turn after Raja, a leader of the DMK, resigned Nov 14 as communications minister. This was after the official auditor held that his policy on spectrum allocation had led to a loss of several billion dollars to the exchequer.
 
 Along with him, also named accused were his personal aide R.K. Chandolia, former telecom secretary Siddhartha Behura and Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Balwa. The probe agency said they had fraudulently caused losses worth billions of rupees to the exchequer.
 
 While the former communications minister was arrested by the agency in the national capital Feb 2, along with Behura and Chandolia, Swan Telecom promoter Shahid Balwa was arrested from Pune on Feb 8.
 
 Later, five more corporate executives were added to the list as co-accused -- Vinod Goenka of Swan Telecom, Sanjay Chandra of Unitech and three officials of Anil Ambani Group: Gautam Doshi, Hari Nair and Surendra Pipara. They were arrested Thursday.
 
 Early this year, the probe agency had raided the offices of Kalaignar TV office, located in same building that houses the DMK headquarters, in connection with the 2G spectrum allocation case. Subsequently, it had questioned Kanimozhi and Dayalu at its office.
 
 The probe agency says Kalaignar TV received Rs.216 crore from Cineyug Films connected to Shahid Usman Balwa of Swan Telecom. But the channel said that Cineyug gave the money as advance towards acquisition of stake in the company in 2009.
 
 “Owing to the differences in valuation of the shares of two companies, a sum of Rs.200 crore received till August 2009 was considered as a loan and was paid back by Kalaignar TV along with an interest of Rs.31 crore,” Kumar had said in a statement earlier.
 
 He also said the transaction was reported and the relevant tax had been paid.