Unitech, Swan caused Rs 7105-crore loss in Spectrum scam:CBI

With the arrest of Shahid Usman Balwa, promoter of Swan, the focus of CBI is now on officials of Unitech who had been instrumental in getting the Unified Access Licenses (UAS) during September 2007 and January 2008.

In a five-page FIR, CBI charged the officials of the Department of Telecom and some private companies entered into a criminal conspiracy and caused wrongful gains to themseleves.
It said M/s Unitech was alloted UAS licenses for 22 cricles for Rs 1658 crore. "It offloaded its 60 per cent of shares in the licenses to Telenor of Norway for Rs 6100 crores even before the roll-out," the FIR said.

Similarly, Swan was alloted UAS licenses for 13 circles for Rs 1537 crore and it sold 45 per cent of shares before roll-out to UAE-based Etislat for Rs 4200 crore.

"The estimated loss to the governemnt by grant of licences to these two companies alone comes to Rs 7,105 crore. On pro-rata basis, the estimated loss for all the 122 circles is more than Rs 22,000 crore," the FIR said.

It said the licenses were issued at a very nominal rate based on prices fixed in the year 2001."As per the information received, all this was done in criminal conspiracy between DoT offcials and private companies in order to award licenses to the company for a heavy consideration by putting a cap on the number of applicants against recommendation of TRAI and by awarding licenses to private companies on first-come-first-serve basis on the rates of 2001 without competitive bidding," the FIR said.