Furthering its investigations into the issuance of telecom licences before 2008, the CBI has asked the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) to furnish the licence agreements of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Essar, BPL, Idea Cellular and Aircel.
According to an internal note of the department, it has already forwarded the documents pertaining to Bharti Telenet in Delhi and Aircel in Mumbai and Delhi.
The letter written on January 18 is part of the probe into the entire procedure followed in the awarding of the licences and the spectrum since 2001.
While Aircel came under scanner after its former chief Sivasankaran in a statement to the CBI alleged that then telecom minister Dayanidhi Maran had compelled him into selling his stake to Malaysian firm Maxis by rejecting his licence applications, Maxis’ owner is considered close to Dayanidhi and his brother Kalanidhi who owns Sun TV. As a result of which the investigative agency is inquiring into the Aircel Maxis deal.
Airtel and Vodafone on the other hand are facing a probe into the allotment of spectrum beyond 4.4 mhz to them. After the Supreme Court, which was monitoring the 2G spectrum scam, ordered a preliminary investigation into the allocation of all the airwaves between 2001 and 2007. The CBI raided the offices of Airtel and Vodafone while alleging in its FIR that DoT had increased the base spectrum for telecom companies from 4.4 MhZ to 6.2 Mhz during the late telecom minister Pramod Mahajan?s tenure from 2001 to 2003 and also allocated extra spectrum on subscriber-based criteria. Consequently, the exchequer suffered a loss of R508 crore after the late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan awarded additional airwaves to these companies in 2002.