The high profile list of accused included politicians, bureaucrats and top businessmen.
New Delhi: A special CBI court Thursday acquitted all accused in the 2G spectrum allocation case, that had tarnished the image of the UPA government and contributed to its unpopularity.
“The prosecution has failed miserably in proving the charges,” said Judge O.P. Saini.
The ruling clears former telecom minister A. Raja, DMK MP Kanimozhi and 19 others. The CBI and the Enforcement Directorate had filed two separate cases alleging that telecom licences were fraudulently allocated.
In 2008, 2G licences were awarded on a first-come-first-served basis to new entrants and CDMA (code division multiple access, a telecom technology standard) operators migrating to GSM (global system for mobile) technology at a price discovered in an auction held seven years earlier.
The high profile list of accused included former telecom secretary Siddharth Behura, Raja’s erstwhile private secretary R.K. Chandolia, Shahid Usman Balwa, promoter of Swan Telecom Pvt. Ltd, D. Sanjay Chandra, MD of Unitech Ltd., and three top executives of Anil Ambani’s Reliance Group.
Swan Telecom, Reliance Telecom Ltd and Unitech Wireless (Tamil Nadu) Ltd were also charged under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002.
In 2012, the apex court cancelled 122 telecom licences and spectrum allocated to nine companies, ruling that the “first-come, first-serve” procedure of allocation was flawed.
The court said spectrum or any other natural resource must be auctioned. The apex court then ordered trial and monitored it for over five years.
That a scam took place is not in doubt. The fair value of each licence – given through a very opaque process masquerading as first come first served – was about 10,000 crores, as inferred from the premium paid by incoming partners such as Etisalat, six times the amount the government received. There is merit in A Raja’s contention that everyone upto the PM – who sought only to be kept at arm’s length from wrongdoing in his government – was in the loop. It would be wrong to treat the trial court’s judgment as the end of this saga.