Last week Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in his interaction with editors, said that Mani Shankar Aiyar, when he was sports minister, opposed the Commonwealth Games on ideological grounds and did not bring any wrongdoing to his notice.

This week, the unputdownable Aiyar has given an interview to CNN-IBN, in which he has spread the cheer all around by dragging in the names of P Chidambaram and Prithviraj Chavan. An excerpt:

On Finance Minister P Chidambaram's role: "I don't know that these letters went to the finance minister, at all. But after one meeting of the Group of Ministers, where my insistence on observing the general financial rules was overruled by the finance minister himself, I did write to Mr Chidambaram. In that letter I did say because I was so upset with the situation, that instead of the sports ministry being asked to release these grants in violation of the GFR to Mr Kalmadi's Organising Committee, why not the finance ministry itself does it? And to the best of my memory, I may be wrong here, that letter was neither acknowledged nor acted upon."

On Prithviraj Chavan: "Well, in fact I was tipped off to the need to ensure that sanctions of authority were properly given by my immediate predecessor who was Sri Prithviraj Chavan. He was the one who tipped me off within weeks of my becoming minister that something was rotten in the state of Denmark, that it was in my own best interest that I should check out what was happening. So I'm grateful to him for that. My secretary was a gentleman who was not in the public eye at that time, but has since gone renowned as one of the most able and honest chief election commissioners we've ever had, that was SY Qureshi and he shared all my concerns."

As they say, over to Round 3!