New Delhi:
The Supreme Court is scheduled to deliver three important verdicts on different parts of the telecom scam today. Justices GS Singhvi and AK Ganguly will announce whether Home Minister P Chidambaram should be investigated by the CBI, which is handling the telecom or 2G scam. Since Justice Ganguly is retiring today, he will be sitting in a bench headed by Chief Justice of India S.H. Kapadia.
Here are 10 big facts about this story:
1) The Supreme Court will announce today whether P Chidambaram should be formally investigated as part of the CBI inquiry into the telecom scam. Mr Chidambaram was Finance Minister in 2008 when nine companies were granted 122 mobile network licenses with second-generation spectrum or airwaves thrown in for free. The swindle - which cost the government Rs 1.76 lakh crores according to the government's auditor - was allegedly engineered by A Raja, who was then Telecom Minister. He is now in jail and is being tried for criminal conspiracy, cheating and breach of trust by a public servant which carries a maximum sentence of a life term in prison.
2) The court will also decide on whether 122 licenses issued during Mr Raja's tenure as Telecom Minister should be cancelled. The petitioners have pleaded that there were multiple illegalities, corruption and favouritism in the grant of these licences. The telecom firms that got these licences, however, deny this and maintain that there were no irregularities. In the past, both the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) and the attorney general have suggested scrapping of the 2G licences given to companies like Uninor, Loop Telecom, Etisalat, Datacom Solutions and STel. In 2010, CAG had recommended cancellation of 85 2G licences. In August 2011, when the Department of Telecom sought legal opinion from the attorney general, he too recommended cancellation of 72 licences.
3)Why is Mr Chidambaram in the hot spot? Janata Party President Subramanian Swamy says that as Finance Minister, Mr Chidambaram endorsed the decisions taken by Mr Raja, and is therefore complicit in the scam. Mr Swamy along with lawyer-activist Prashant Bhushan has petitioned the Supreme Court on different dimensions of the scam. The CBI's investigation was ordered in 2010 on the basis of petitions by Mr Swamy and Mr Bhushan in the Supreme Court. Mr Swamy says that documents show that Mr Chidambaram was consulted by Mr Raja in four meetings on the pricing of spectrum and licenses. Mr Chidambaram, he says, over-ruled officials in his ministry who suggested an auction of spectrum. Instead, Mr Raja chose to award licenses on a first-come-first-serve basis - and then manipulated the rules to allegedly help companies he favoured and moved them to the head of the queue. They were sold licenses at rates used in 2001, even though India's mobile subscriber base had shot up nearly a 100 times since then.
4) While the Supreme Court will decide on whether the CBI should investigate Mr Chidambaram, a special CBI court that's handling the telecom scam trial will decide on Saturday whether he should be made a co-accused in the case. That petition has also been filed by Mr Swamy.
5) Mr Raja has in his defence in court repeatedly stated that Mr Chidambaram and the Prime Minister were both kept updated on how he planned to allot what's called the 2G licenses. He has also threatened to summon Mr Chidambaram as a witness.
6)Is there any evidence against Mr Chidambaram? What has escalated the case against Mr Chidambaram, currently the Home Minister, is a note that was sent by the Finance Ministry in March this year to the Prime Minister's office. The note suggested that in 2008, the Finance Ministry headed by Mr Chidambaram could have done more to insist that Mr Raja conduct an auction of valuable spectrum.
"... the Finance Minister did not deal with the need, if any, to revise entry fee or the rate of revenue share... Subsequently, in a meeting held on January 30, 2008, between the then Minister of Finance and (the then Minister of) Telecommunications, it was noted by the former that he was for now not seeking to revisit the current regimes for entry fee or revenue share," the note from the Department of Economic Affairs said.
(Read: Full text of the Finance Ministry's note on 2G)
7)Mr Chidambaram's defence: The government has staunchly defended Mr Chidambaram so far, and has said that he was not in direct communication with Mr Raja about his policies. The government has argued that it was not Mr Raja's policies that were the problem, but a manipulation of the rules that spawned the massive telecom scam. Mr Chidambaram has said that he tried to enforce an auction of spectrum and that he alerted the Prime Minister to the potential problems of Mr Raja's policies. Mr Chidambaram has said that he was in favour of an auction and had said so on more than one occasion. As for allowing sale of equity by Swan and Unitech, Mr Chidambaram has said there was no violation, it was in sync with DoT guidelines and was legal.
8)Was an auction necessary? TRAI or The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India recently said that guidelines in 2008 did not mandate an auction for 2G frequency. In a report submitted to the trial court headed by Judge OP Saini, the regulatory body said that when licenses were awarded, the goal was not revenue generation. The idea was to improve mobile phone services for the average Indian and to provide more connectivity at low prices. TRAI's report has been seized by many of those on trial as part of their defence.
9)A third important verdict is expected: the Supreme Court is likely to decide on whether to sanction Prashant Bhushan's request for a Special Investigating Team (SIT) to monitor the CBI's inquiry. Mr Bhushan and Mr Swamy have both alleged that the CBI is under pressure from the government to protect Mr Chidambaram.
10) Mr Swamy alleges that Mr Chidambaram should also be held responsible because it was on his watch as Finance Minister that two companies were allowed to sell their licenses to foreign investors at huge profits. Unitech Wireless and Swan Telecom landed partnerships with Telenor and Etisalat DB respectively. Their promoters have argued that they did not sell their stake; they diluted equity. The government has said that the laws at the time were not broken by either company. The huge prices paid by the foreign companies, however, do highlight how under-valued the licenses were.