Reacting to the allegations that Karunanidhi raised through his regular column in DMK mouthpiece Murasoli, Dayanidhi Maran told a hurriedly-called press meet later on Friday that his elder brother Kalanidhi had written a letter to the CM — not as a counter argument but as a clarification to clear the air.

Sources said Karunanidhi is peeved with the Marans and the Sun Group for being critical about the state Government and Dayanidhi’s successor in the Telecom Ministry, A Raja, who is embroiled in a multi-crore spectrum allocation controversy. The visual and print media owned by Sun Group had alleged that Raja went against a TRAI order on auctioning all spectrum.

The group’s daily dose of news bulletin is more critical about the functioning of the state Government than even the media houses floated by opposition parties.

Adding a hitherto unspoken business angle to the estrangement, Karunanidhi questioned the way in which the shares of Sun Group were bought from his family.

After the death of Karunanidhi’s nephew and Union Minister Murasoli Maran, the brothers had bought back the shares of the Sun Group held by Karunanidhi’s family (said to be 20 per cent) at a sum of Rs 100 crore “with a sense of urgency”. The group soon went public at the height of stock market boom, propelling the brothers into the list of Indian billionaires.

It was he who persuaded his reluctant family to agree to the settlement offered by the group so that there would be no ill-feelings within the family, wrote the CM. His article accompanied photographs of the former corporate office of the Sun Group, which was allegedly ransacked when they were asked to vacate the premises.

Terming the controversial survey published by Sun Group’s vernacular daily Dinakaran in May, 2007 — which slighted Karunanidhi’s elder son M K Azhagiri by placing him in the last of a list of potential heir to the DMK president — as a deliberate attempt to create rift in his family, Karunanidhi said the Marans had gone ahead with publishing the survey despite his specific instruction not to do so.

In his attempt to “clear the allegations”, Dayanidhi told the media that Kalanidhi had written a letter to Karunanidhi, detailing their version of the allegations. “For the past one-and-a-half years, my family has been keeping quiet about the allegations raised against us. But now we have realised that if we do not clear the air, the general public might perceive these false charges as truth,” he said, refusing to elaborate on the contents of the letter.

He claimed that they possessed photographs and videos depicting the condition of the office building when they vacated it.

Dayanidhi hastened to add that the letter was not a counter the CM but a clarification to present their side of the story. Incidentally, there was no mention about his statement on the Sun News on Friday.