Bharti pays dues, decides to keep Punjab licence

Our eFE Bureau in New Delhi

Two days after the Cabinet decided to restore the Punjab cellular licence of Evergrowth Telecom — a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bharti Mobile (the erstwhile JT Mobile) — Bharti Enterprises has decided to keep the licence, instead of handing it over to Essar.

Interestingly, for the last one year, Bharti officials had been saying that they are “unnecessarily being harassed by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) on the Evergrowth issue.” Their earlier stand was that “the company was not part of the deal when Bharti acquired JT Mobile,” the parent company of Evergrowth, two years ago.

In earlier interviews, Bharti officials had clearly said that since the “shares of Evergrowth had been pledged to Essar in exchange for a Rs 200 crore infusion into the company, if and when restored, the Punjab cellular licence will go to Essar and not Bharti.”

However, after Bharti paid up the full outstanding amount of Rs 490 crore to the DoT on Thursday, the company announced that it plans to start cellular services in Punjab.

When quizzed about why the licence is not being given to Essar or if and when the Rs 200 crore fund infusion will be remitted to the company, Bharti sources indicated that “the decision on whether the funds infused by Essar will be returned or adjusted will be held in abeyance till the arbitrator, appointed by the Government, gives his decision on the actual dues payable by Evergrowth.”

The bone of contention between DoT and Evergrowth was the amount of dues to be paid by the company. Evergrowth’s licence to provide cellular services in Punjab had been cancelled in 1996 due to non-payment of licence fee dues. The Government wanted the company to shell out the entire amount, including licence fee and interest accrued in the time period when the licence of the company stood cancelled. The company, however, wanted the licence to be restored only on the payment of the non-disputed amount.