New Delhi:
A Raja, former Telecom Minister arrested for executing India's biggest scam, has got a major leg-up in his defence. The country's main regulatory body for Telecom has said that Mr Raja followed government policy, and that it's not possible to determine the losses caused by his controversial handling of licenses in 2008.
That's likely to cause some serious heartburn for the CBI, which is investigating Mr Raja and some of India's senior-most executives in the telecom sector, who are now in Tihar Jail. The CBI has said that in 2008, Mr Raja conspired with these companies to give them out-of-turn licences for mobile networks and accompanying second-generation or 2G spectrum. The CBI believes this cost India 30,000 crores. Experts believe that Mr Raja deliberately and greatly under-valued the licences to favour these companies.
Mr Raja says that in fact, he went strictly by the book, and that the Prime Minister and then Finance Minister P Chidambaram had signed off on his course of action. At the time, he has said, the policy required him to sell and not auction spectrum. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has now told the CBI that's correct. The regulatory body has also said that it's not possible to predict what sort of prices an auction would have raised for 2G. Any retrospective estimates of losses, it says, are inherently risky because of a paucity of data.
On September 15, a special court assigned to handle the 2G case will decide if charges against Mr Raja and the arrested telecom executives should be framed - effectively, the judge will decide if they should be put on trial and whether there's any merit to the CBI's allegations against them.
Mr Raja was arrested in February. Kapil Sibal, who replaced Mr Raja as Telecom Minister, infamously declared that there were no losses caused by the 2G scam. Mr Raja has used this frequently in court to question what the case against him is. The government has said that it's not the policies, but Mr Raja's implementation, that allowed him to push companies he was partnering with to the head of the queue that is problematic.
Senior telecom executives like Sanjay Chandra of Unitech Wireless and Gautam Doshi of Reliance have been in jail since April. While wrapping up its arguments, the CBI conceded that in Mr Chandra's case, it has no evidence to suggest that a kickback was given to Mr Raja in return for the license he received. However, the CBI said it believes Mr Chandra conspired with Mr Raja in designing how his company and others would be allowed to get licenses ahead of others.