Vodafone Idea on Thursday moved the Supreme Court seeking clarification/modification to its September last year’s order to allow the company to carry out corrections relating to manifest/clerical/arithmetic errors on the Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) dues.
Vodafone Idea approached the Apex Court, a day after Bharti Airtel sought recalculation AGR dues.
Insisting that the company is not seeking “reassessment or raising any dispute regarding AGR,” Vodafone Idea said that it wants a modification to “a limited extent of allowing to carry out corrections.”
The excess demand upon the applicant (Vodafone) which is attributable to these errors amounts to Rs 5,932 crore of principal amount, which would have an overall impact of over four times on the total principal amount ... due to imposition of interest, penalty and interest on penalty," Vodafone stated in its fresh application.
Vodafone in its petition said that the correction sought are not disputes but only correction of manifest errors in the earlier demands, which can be easily checked by Department of Telecom (DoT) and given effect after a simple process of verification.
As per the DoT's calculation, Airtel has to pay a total of Rs 43,980 crore in AGR dues including principal, interest, penalty and interest on penalty. The company has already paid Rs 18,004 crore.
However, the telecom firm's self-assessment dues to the government puts it at Rs 13,004 crore.
According to the DoT, Vodafone's AGR due was Rs 58,400 crore and the company paid Rs 7,854 crore.
Three-judge apex court bench, headed by Justice Arun Mishra in September last year, directed telecom firms to make 10% upfront payment of their AGR dues, with the 10-year payment schedule to begin on 1 April, 2021. The court ordered that annual instalments to be paid by 7 February every year.
While the court had upheld the DOT definition of AGR, it also rejected the telecom firms' argument that their self assessment dues are less than the DoT's demands.
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