Thaindian News

Chennai, March 20 (IANS) AIADMK general secretary J.Jayalalithaa Saturday again demanded that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh drop Telecom Minister A. Raja in the wake of Supreme Court declining to intervene in a high court order that found violations in the 2G spectrum allocation.
“Now that he has the Supreme Court’s order to back him, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh should not hesitate further to sack Raja. Only this will give credence to his claim that he is a prime minister with ‘zero tolerance’ for corrupt practices,” Jayalalithaa said in a statement issued here.

Citing the case history, she said the department of telecommunications (DoT) had, through a press release on the night of Sep 24, 2007, announced the last date for filing applications for allotment of 2G spectrum licences as October 1, 2007.

“S Tel, one of the players, applied in all the 22 circles. Of these, six applications were filed Sep 25. Applications for all the other circles were completed by Sep 28, well before the officially announced cut-off date, she said.

However, through a pressnote released at 2.45 p.m. January 10, 2008, and without assigning any reasons, the DoT announced it had decided to change the cut-off-date to September 25, 2007. It further asked the applicants to remit the licence fee between 3.30 p.m. and 4.30 p.m. the same day, through demand draft, she said.

“It is a mystery as to how the applicant companies could have arranged demand drafts of around Rs.1,500 crore each within an hour, unless they had been provided prior information of who the allottees were. The whole exercise smacked of blatant favouritism and insider trading,” Jayalalithaa alleged.

Companies like S Tel further discovered that by changing the cut-off date, their applications submitted after Sep 25 had been rendered ineligible. They, therefore, challenged the sudden and retrospective reversal.

S Tel won its case in the high court before a single-judge bench as well as before a division bench.

In both cases the DOT had claimed the policy of first-cum-first served basis for allotment of spectrum and change of cut-off-date had been finalised with the prime minister’s concurrence, she said.

According to her, the DOT in its appeal to the Supreme Court deleted the claim that the prime minister had concurred with all its actions.

Charging Raja with deciding to “tighten the screws on the complainant S Tel, which started operations in three areas”, Jayalalithaa said: “The telecom minister, through a junior DoT official, issued a two-line order to S Tel March 6, 2010, after office hours, ordering closure of services due to security concerns.”

“The ’security concerns’ were not elaborated. No show-cause notice was served. This was the first time that the DoT issued a service discontinuation order without giving a show-cause notice. By March 8, S Tel had no alternative but to agree to withdraw their complaint against the minister of telecom in order to protect their business,” Jayalalithaa added.

According to her, a compromise draft was presented on behalf of DoT before the Supreme Court which refused to provide Raja any relief.