Thaindian News

New Delhi, Feb 6 (IANS) With the Supreme Court ordering the cancellation of three of its licences, Tata Teleservices Ltd. (TTL) Monday said it will be filing a review petition against the decision as the company had applied for these licences in 2006 which were delayed and given to them in 2008.

The company wants to be delinked from other firms who were issued licences in 2008.

“TTL applied for these three licenses way back in June 2006 and this was kept pending for over 18 months until LOIs (letters of intent) were finally issued in January 2008,” the company said in a statement.

“TTL has been advised to file a review petition in the Supreme Court seeking redressal on this point,” it added.

The company’s licences for Assam, the northeast region, and Jammu and Kashmir stand cancelled following last week’s ruling.

It welcomed the Supreme Court’s decision that spectrum, a scarce national resource, will be allotted through auction.

“It has always been our view that spectrum has value and should be paid for. The aberrations in the policy date back to 2001 and have resulted in wrongful allocations, the beneficiaries of which were not before the court,” the statement said.

“If auction covers spectrum wrongfully-allocated since 2001 and is executed in an equitable manner, without bias in favour of selected operators or specific technologies, it should bring in greater transparency and fair-play into the telecom industry,” it added.

At the time when Japan’s NTT Docomo invested in TTL, the company had been in operations for over 12 years, had 17 licences and an annual turnover of Rs.6,000 crore and had 3,000 employees.

“The investment made by its partner NTT Docomo was, therefore, not on account of these three licences but on account of TTL’s established position as one of the strong players in the telecom field, apart from its strong Tata brand,” the statement added.