122 2G licences were cancelled by SC
NEW DELHI (PTI): The Supreme Court on Wednesday cancelled the 122 2G spectrum licences granted by former telecom minister A Raja on the ground that they were issued in a ”totally arbitrary and unconstitutional” manner.
Also the court directed regulator Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to make fresh recommendations on allocation of 2G licences and imposed a fine of Rs. 5 crore each on three telecom companies, which offloaded their shares after getting the licenses.
A bench comprising justices G S Singhvi and A K Ganguly said the allocation of spectrum will be done through the policy of auction within four months.
The order was passed on petitions filed by NGO CPIL and Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy alleging scam in the allocation of spectrum licences by Raja in January, 2008 during the tenure of UPA-I government, on which the CAG had assumed the presumptive loss of upto Rs 1.76 lakhs.
The companies that are going to lose on account of the cancellation of the licences are Uninor (joint venture between Unitech and Telenor of Norway), Loop Telecom, Sistema Shyam (joint venture between Shyam and Sistema of Russia), Etisalat DB (joint venture between Swan and Etisalat of UAE), S Tel, Videocon, Tatas and Idea.
The 122 licences were given by Raja for over Rs 9,000 crore, while 3G auctions for a smaller number of licences had fetched the government a sum of Rs 69,000 crores.
