Russian conglomerate Sistema?s chief, Vladimir Yevtushenkov, has written to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh complaining that the current regulatory environment in the country was tilting against new operators such as Sistema-controlled Sistema Shyam Tele Services (SSTL) and is in favour of incumbent operators. Yevtushenkov also urged the PM for a meeting to explain his company?s precarious position.

?SSTL was the only applicant for pan-India CDMA licences in 2008. No other operator sought the CDMA spectrum before or after the auction. Consequently, there was no queue for allotment of pan-India CDMA licences and so the allotment of telecom licences to SSTL wasn?t on the basis of the first-come, first-served policy, which was held as fundamentally flawed by the Supreme court when it cancelled 122 telecom licences,? he argued.

Upset that the government might not charge incumbent operators a one-time levy on the spectrum they hold, Yevtushenkov has written, ?We are particularly concerned that various measures are being adopted which seem to favour incumbent operators to the detriment of Indian consumers and new operators like SSTL.?

Clearly referring to a recent spate of events wherein various ministries in the government including the PM-controlled finance ministry seem to be veering towards reducing the pay-out burden on incumbent operators by charging only for some spectrum held by them, Yevtushenkov has said that any such move by department of telecommunications would amount to offering ?bailout packages? to incumbent operators by waiving all payments for spectrum held by them despite telecom commission having decided to charge ?for the same.

The company has invested close to $3 billion in the country and currently has a subscriber base of 16 million.

The letter lashes out at the sectoral regulator, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), saying that its recommendation of fixing the base price for the 2G spectrum auctions for a CDMA operator at two times that of the GSM is arbitrary and targeted against SSTL which is the sole CDMA operator in the country.

He has further threatened that in case the Trai?s reserve price were accepted the company would be forced to exit the Indian market. ?Trai has exceeded the mandate of the Supreme court ?by recommending arbitrarily high reserve prices and further recommending a reserve price for CDMA spectrum twice as high as that of the GSM. This seems to be particularly targeted at SSTL which is a purely CDMA operator in the country,” he has said.