15 July 2024 Punjab Khabarnama : Telecom company Vodafone Idea (Vi) on July 15 sought an urgent listing of its curative petition against the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment on the payments to government.
Appearing for the debt-ridden telco, senior advocate Harish Salve told a bench led by Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud that the curative plea was filed in September 2023 but since then there has been a restructuring in Vi and the company’s backers want a closure to the Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) issue.
Salve also told the court that the company’s new backers would like to know Vi’s exact liability towards AGR dues.
The CJI said he would take a call on listing the case soon.
In its plea filed in September, Vodafone Idea said, “The company is already on the verge of a financial crisis, which threatens its very existence, and the judgment passed by this Hon’ble Court, prohibiting even the correction of clerical and arithmetical errors in the demands, foreclosing any reduction of the amount payable by thousands of crores of rupees and further imposing a penalty and interest on penalty, is highly unjust.”
The company said these two components are more significant than the principal amount itself. It is not challenging the imposition of the licence fee but filed the petition because the judgment contains “serious jurisdictional errors”, it said.
What is the case about?
The National Telecom Policy (NTP) of 1999 permitted telecommunication companies to pay their licence fee and spectrum fee to the government as a percentage of their yearly income. However, telecom companies disputed the definition of the term Gross Revenue at the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) and the Supreme Court.
Telcos contested that AGR should include only those revenues the company earns from the telecommunication business.
DoT contested the claim and said the telcos must pay 8 percent of the entire revenue to the government as licence and spectrum fee.
The Supreme Court’s judgment imposed a penalty, saying “no litigant can be permitted to reap fruits on such inconsistent and untenable stands and litigate for decades in several rounds, which is not so uncommon but is a disturbing scenario projected in very many cases”.
As a result, DoT’s total demand amounted to Rs 1.19 lakh crore — Vodafone Idea owed Rs 58,254 crore, Bharti Airtel Rs 43,989 crore, and Tata Teleservices owed Rs 16,798 crore to the government.
With telecom players contesting the government’s demand since 2002 in tribunals and at the Supreme Court, the dues ballooned.
In 2020, the Supreme Court gave a 10-year time frame to the companies to pay the dues. In 2021, the SC rejected Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel’s plea to recompute the dues.
A curative petition is filed by a party after the top court dismisses its plea to review a judgment. It seeks to reverse those portions of the judgment which the petitioner sees as a grave miscarriage of justice.
At 1.06 pm, the Vodafone Idea stock was trading at Rs16.54 on the National Stock Exchange, up 2.8 percent.
