CBI books former top Reliance Infocomm officials

After a year's probe into auto-routing of international calls as local ones, the CBI has registered a case against four senior officials of Reliance Infocomm, before the split between Ambani brothers, and some unknown officials of the Bharat Sanchar Nigam.

The Reliance Infocomm officials have been alleged by the CBI of entering into a criminal conspiracy with certain officials of the BSNL and "masking" international calls as local ones through a specially designed software.

The CBI named Manoj Modi, the then director of Reliance Infocomm, Akhil Gupta, the then CEO, A Shankar, the then head of the company's corporate affairs, Pankaj Panwar, the then head regulator of the company, and other unnamed officials of Reliance and BSNL in the case, the CBI sources said.

During the probe, the CBI would also ascertain the ramifications of the auto-routing of international calls for threat to national security as pointed out by the the Telecom Dispute Settlement Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), while imposing a penalty of Rs 150 crore on Reliance Infocomm for allegedly breaching the licence conditions.

According to CBI, any call generated from foreign country used to land at three gateways in Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai from where collected calls were "masked" with the help of the software and sent as local ones to the public system telephone network (PSTN).

The alleged re-routing of calls were done with a view to avoid payment of access deficit charge, which private telecom operators are supposed to pay to BSNL to offset their unremunerative services in rural areas.

During the preliminary probe, the CBI quizzed Reliance Infocomm and BSNL's chief technical officers in connection with the alleged masquerading of calls by the private telecom giant to avoid payment of a fee.