Infocomm moves SC over TDSAT's Rs 150 cr fine

Reliance Infocomm has challenged in Supreme Court an order of Telecom Dispute Settlement and Appellate Tribunal(TDSAT) upholding the imposition of a penalty of Rs 150 crore on it by the government for allegedly resorting to call re-routing.

Reliance Infocomm has contended that the call re-routing was a global practice, which was resorted to by all service providers including the telecom PSUs, MTNL and BSNL.

Reliance Infocomm, the biggest private sector telecom company, which Anil Ambani got last month as part of settlement of Reliance ownership, moved the apex court for recovery of the fine paid by it following the order of TDSAT in March this year.

Earlier, department of telecom(DoT) had imposed a penalty of Rs 150 crore on Reliance Infocomm for violating the licence condition, and the same was challenged by Reliance in TDSAT.

Reliance Infocomm, then owned by Mukesh Ambani, had paid the penalty under protest while reserving the right to challenge TDSAT's verdict in the Supreme Court.

Earlier in its reply in TDSAT, government had said that Reliance Infocomm, by resorting to re-routing of incoming international calls, had tampered with the caller-line identification, which could lead to security threats.

According to the government, Reliance was re-routing the international calls in order to avoid levy payable by it to MTNL and BSNL. In fact, both the PSUs had raised a demand of over Rs 550 crore on Reliance Infocomm to recover the levy, known as Access deficit charge (ADC), and the private operator had paid nearly Rs 500 crore to both the PSUs, even as the case was pending in the Delhi High Court.

Reliance filed the petition in the Supreme Court last week and the case is yet to come up for hearing.

While dismissing Reliance's petition, on March 4, TDSAT had termed as "unscrupulous" the method employed by the private telecom company to camouflage international calls as local calls.

Upholding the contention of Solicitor General GE Vahanvati, who appeared for DoT, TDSAT had said camouflaging of international calls by Reliance Infocomm was "in total breach of the licence conditions".