The Attorney General (AG) has said the cancelled telecom licences could be reinstated with the date of migration set between August 1, 1999 and March 2000.
However, the cancelled licensees will not be provided the benefit of normalisation of licence fee dues. The AG 's opinion will affect six licencees including Koshika Telecom (Uttar Pradesh-West, Bihar and Orissa), Aircel Digilink (Haryana and Rajasthan) and JT Mobile (Punjab). These licences were cancelled in mid-1999 due to non-payment of dues.
It is learnt that the AG has said these licences could not be given the same effective date as the rest of the industry, which is July 31, since the licences were cancelled by then.
A prospective effective date from March-April 2000 could also pose problems, since the total licence payments will be payable by this date in at least four cases with front loaded licence fees, it has been pointed out.
Therefore a migration with an effective date between the two time periods could be offered to these companies, it has said. In late 1999, the Attorney General set down certain terms and conditions for migration, such as a higher upfront penalty of 40 per cent against 35 per cent for the rest of the industry of arrears.
However, the date from which the decision would take effect had yet to be settled. And the matter was referred back to the Attorney General in January 2000. However, the request for normalisation, put up by Koshika, may have been turned down, it is learnt. Since the company had originally given a front-loaded bid, the entire licence fee was payable in four years.
A date of migration in 1999-2000 would require the company to dish out most of its licence fees for migrating while other operators, who had given mostly equated bids, had to pay only 30-40 per cent of bid amount. However, it has been maintained that since the licence was based on the original bid, the structure of the bid could not be altered retrospectively.
