Was Swan favoured by Raja?Indian Express columnist explains

Prananjoy Guha Thakurta in his column at Indian Express has mentioned that on the March 31 draft report of Rajendra Kumar, senior audit officer (inspection) of the Post & Telecommunications Audit Office (under the Comptroller & Auditor General of India) has sharply indicted the Department of Telecommunications under Raja for a host of ‘discrepancies’ in issuing letters of intent to applicants for 2G licences with spectrum. The manner in which the cut-off date for receipt of applications was arbitrarily brought forward from October 1, 2007 to September 25, the sudden announcement of the DoT’s decision to receive licences on its website at 1.47 pm on January 10, 2008, the fact that an applicant was given time between 3.30 pm and 4.30 pm that afternoon to submit an application considered on a first-come-first-served basis, the way in which one particular firm, Swan, was favoured — all these moves have been questioned in the report.


Thakurta in his this column cited Sitaram Yechury's letter to PM which alleges that The ministry illegally modified the M&A (merger and acquisition) guidelines and roll-out obligations allowing for sale of equity.

"This sale of equity in effect is equivalent to a private re-sale of the license. This means that though the national exchequer did not receive the market price of 2G spectrum, the companies benefiting from the minister’s largesse, conducted a sale of spectrum at current market price, converting what should have been an open, transparent public auction (of the kind recently concluded on 3G spectrum) into a private auction. This explains why Swan and Unitech were able to get 5-6 times the value of the spectrum from only a part of their equity sale" says Yechury Letter.

Yehcury has refuted Raja's claim, repeated by PM, that he followed TRAI's recommendations.

‘The minister chose to implement only certain elements of the recommendations while flouting three key recommendations of the TRAI — relating to entry limit on service providers, M&A rules and roll-out obligations. This, in spite of the fact that TRAI itself has observed in multiple letters to the DoT, that the government should not cherry-pick from its recommendations — the recommendations should be seen as a whole’, he wrote.

Source: Express Buzz.com