Tatas to file review petition, takes different argument

Breaking its silence after the Supreme Court cancelled three of the company’s CDMA licences, Tata Teleservices Limited (TTL) on Monday said it would go for a review petition against the judicial verdict. The service provider, however, distanced itself from the other Indian real estate players who got in foreign investors, like Telenor and Etisalat, within a few months of getting their licence before the court eventually nullified their licence.

TTSL said here that at a time when NTT Docomo invested in TTL, the Tata company had been in operations for over 12 years. It already had 17 licences, had reached an annual turnover of Rs 6,000 crore, had 3,000 employees, about 100 offices, 33 million subscribers, 60,000 km of fibre, an NLD business, 38 per cent investments in Tata Teleservices (Maharashtra) Limited and 100 per cent investments in its tower subsidiary, the company said in a statement.

“The clubbing of TTL with two licensees who had just entered the telecom business from the real estate sector appears to have also overlooked this,” it said in a press statement. Also, only three new licenses were granted to TTL in January 2008 — these were for Assam, the Northeast and Jammu & Kashmir, “and most of all, these were CDMA licences”, it added.

The investment made by its strategic partner NTT Docomo was, therefore, not on account of these three licences, but on account of TTL’s established position as one of the strong players in the telecom field, apart from its strong Tata brand. TTL had applied for these three licences way back in June 2006 and this was kept pending for over 18 months, until letters of intent were finally issued in January 2008.

The company added the aberrations in the policy date back to 2001 and resulted in wrongful allocations, the beneficiaries of which were not before the court. If auction covers spectrum wrongfully allocated since 2001 and is executed in an equitable manner, without bias in favour of selected operators or specific technologies, it should bring in greater transparency and fair-play into the telecom industry, it noted.