SC quashes telcos’ plea for correction
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court refused to review the amount payable by telecom companies to the government towards AGR related dues, dealing a blow to operators Vodafone Idea Ltd and Bharti Airtel Ltd.
The bench, headed by Justice L. Nageswara Rao, rejected the applications moved by Vodafone Idea, Bharti Airtel and Tata Teleservices that had pointed out alleged errors in calculation in the figure of AGR dues and sought a recomputation of the dues. “We have dealt with all the three applications by a common order. All the miscellaneous applications are rejected,” said the bench, which also included justices S.A. Nazeer and M.R. Shah while pronouncing the operative part of the order.
The court lent credence to its September 2020 judgment, which had categorically stated that dues payable by telcos will not be open to any reassessment.
“That, for the demand raised by the Department of Telecommunications in respect of the AGR dues based on the judgment of this court, there shall not be any dispute raised by any of the telecom operators and that there shall not be any reassessment,” the September 2020 judgment noted.
Citing this part of the previous judgment, the bench on Friday refused to reopen the issue and opined that entertaining the telecom majors’ plea would amount to indirectly reviewing the September 2020 order.
With the dismissal of the applications, the court has yet again put a stamp on Dot’s calculation, according to which telecom service providers must pay ₹93,520 crore of AGR related dues over a period of 10 years.
According to a note submitted by the DOT in the Supreme Court last year, Vodafone Idea owed ₹58,254 crore out of which it has paid around ₹7,850 crores. Bharti Airtel had total dues of ₹43,980 crore, and the group had cleared a little over ₹18,000 crore. Out of the total outstanding of ₹16,798 crore, Tata Telecom has paid ₹4,197 cr till date.
On a previous hearing on July 19, the telecom companies had claimed arithmetical errors besides cases of duplication of entries, as they sought to persuade the bench that they were not asking for reassessment but were only looking for rectification of calculation errors. The court was requested to allow them to approach the DOT, which could look into their grievances and inform the court.
With a debt of ₹1.8 lakh crore and cash balance of ₹350 crore, Vodafone Idea, through senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, linked the firm’s viability to reduction of its AGR dues, asking for a permission to place the calculations before DOT.
Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi, for Airtel, and senior counsel Arvind Datar, for Tata, too submitted that they were not seeking a recomputation of their dues, but only an opportunity with DOT to rectify certain mistakes in calculation.