Leading telecommunications service provider Bharti Airtel on Monday announced that it has prepaid Rs 8,465 crore to the Department of Telecom, Government of India in order to clear its deferred dues against spectrum acquired in 2016. These liabilities carried an interest rate of 9.3 percent, and the prepayment will reduce the company’s debt burden and optimise financial costs.
“Bharti Airtel (Airtel), one of India’s leading telecommunications service providers, today said that it has prepaid Rs 8,465 crores to the Department of Telecom (Government of India) against spectrum acquired in 2016. These liabilities carried an interest rate of 9.3 per cent,” the company said in a regulatory filing.
Now this is not the first step by Bharti Airtel towards streamlining its financial obligations. Earlier in June, the company had prepaid Rs 7,904 crore, clearing all its deferred liabilities related to spectrum purchased in auctions between 2012 and 2015. These were at an even higher interest rates of 9.75 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.
In January this year, Bharti Airtel also prepaid Rs 8,325 crore to the telecom department in order to partly clear its dues for airwaves acquired in the 2015 auction.
This comes at a time when the telecom company took a hit by a Supreme Court decision on the petitions filed by telcos to refigure the adjusted gross revenues (AGR). Amid a long standing dispute over the payment of dues to the government, the Supreme Court earlier this month, dismissed the petitions. The curative petitions were filed by Vodafone, Airtel, and others, challenging a 2019 verdict mandating payment of Rs 92,000 crore to the government within three months. The telecom companies argued that the DoT made an error in calculating these dues.
