The Centre For Public Interest Litigation (CPIL) has asked the Supreme Court to bring the Videocon Group within the scope of the Central Bureau of Investigation?s (CBI) scrutiny of the 2G issue. This is on grounds that one of its companies was a beneficiary of spectrum allocation, during the tenure of former Minister of Telecommunications and IT, A. Raja.
CPIL also said that Datacom, jointly owned by Videocon and HFCL, was at the ninth position in the list of applicants for spectrum but it topped the list when the first-cum-first-served policy was changed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT).
In its application, CPIL said, “Datacom came to the top position in 20 circles after the order of priority was altered. The CBI has, so far, apparently ignored this and other vital aspects, and its decision to leave out Datacom from the charge sheets has weakened the prosecution case.?
Referring to the Justice Shivraj Patil committee report, which was appointed to look into the alleged irregularities in the spectrum allocation, CPIL added that the document revealed that Datacom had overtaken Swan Telecom (in 11 circles), Idea Cellular, S Tel and Spice.
