The Indian joint venture of Norway's Telenor, Uninor has expressed "shock" and feels "unfairly treated"as a total of 122 licences issued since January 2008 have been cancelled in the Supreme Court ruling today which include 22 licences of Uninor.
Uninor was also charged a penalty of Rs 5 crore to which Unitech reacted in a statement saying: “We have been unfairly treated as we simply followed the government process. We are shocked to see that Uninor is being penalised for faults the court has found in the government process."
"It is important to note that order does not stop our operations for now. We will study the order in detail and exercise all options available to ensure that Uninor continues to operate in India."
"We also expect the authorities to ensure that our 36 million customers, 17500 workforce and 22,000 partners are not unjustly affected.”
Joint venture partner Telenor said: "It has always been clear that this pertains to actions that happened much before we entered India. When we have not caused any of the faults found by the courts, it is obvious to everyone that our investment must not be jeopardised. We look to the Government to arrive at a fair outcome."
Telenor Group has already invested over Rs 6,100 crore in equity and over Rs 8,000 crore in corporate guarantees as a foreign investor that trusts a licence stamped by the Government of India.
Reliance Communications (RCom) also issued a statement on the Bombay Stock Exchange that said: "RCom licences were issued all in 2001 or prior. RCom's licences are NOT affected by the Supreme Court judgement pronounced today."
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Meanwhile, Aditya Birla Group's Idea Cellular has said that, "It has unnecessarily been caught in this situation of cancelled licences, just because they were granted in January, 2008 which was as late as 18 months from the date of application. In fact, the company had filed a petition in TDSAT inter alia seeking to isolate our application from the 2007-08 applications, and thus requesting for priority under the then DoT policy of “first come first serve”."
Further, it added that it is unfortunate that a serious incumbent operator like Idea Cellular is being made to suffer, despite being fully compliant at each stage of the licence allocation process and it will study in detail the SC judgment and "explore all possibilities to protect our investment".
Idea Cellular in these 7 service areas currently has over 6 million subscribers. These account for about 5% of Idea’s cumulative Capex, 4% of its revenue, and are EBITDA loss making circles.
The shares of Unitech are trading down by 7.78% at Rs 24.90 apiece and RCom was trading down by 4% at Rs 96.50 per share on the BSE although shares of Idea Cellular were trading higher.