Pradeep Chaddah, special CBI judge has backed the complaint filed by Dr Subramanian Swamy, National President, Janata Party. Dr Sawmy had asked the Supreme Court to cancel 2G spectrum licences issued by A. Raja, former minister of telecommunications and IT. Swamy also sought the possibility of holding a fresh auction process for eligible entities for all the 122 licences in 22 circles across the country.
Chaddah added that Swamy will first have to testify as a complainant, after which his request of being appointed as a deemed public prosecutor will be considered.
In his appeal, Swamy said that the Department of Telecommunications, then headed by Raja, had arbitrarily advanced the cut-off date for submitting applications for allocation of 2G spectrum from 1 October to 25 September, 2007. He added that the DoT changed the cut-off date without consulting the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and passed several norms to benefit Swan telecom (now Etisalat DB), Unitech, Loop Telecom and Datacom (now Videocon).
In addition, it has been alleged that Swan was owned by Reliance Infocom, while Unitech inked a joint venture with Norway-based Telenor much later than what was publicised and Loop and Datacom were owned by the Ruia Group and Videocon respectively. Therefore, Swamy has said that these companies had unauthorised intimation of the changed prerequisites and were thus able to immediately provide the paperwork and pay the license fees.
Swamy also claimed that in less than a year, by October 2008, all four companies had divested themselves of part of their licenses at enormous profit. The petition alleged that Swan sold 45 per cent of its shares to UAE-based Etisalat and Unitech Wireless sold 60 per cent of its shares to Telenor, while Tata Teleservices Limited (TTSL) sold 26 per cent of its shares to DOCOMO.
The petition also said that the DoT had received 575 applications for grant of licenses from 46 companies for all the 22 service areas which were equally entitled to issue of the desired licenses. Swamy emphasised that the licences already issued need to be cancelled as the DoT ignored the advice of the law ministry and went ahead with issuing 85 of the 122 licenses to ineligible entities, causing a huge loss to the state exchequer.
