The Hindu Business Line : VSNL files writ against court order on FLAG access

In May this year, the International Chamber of Commerce's Arbitration Tribunal had ruled that VSNL must grant FLAG access to the Mumbai cable landing station of the FLAG Europe-Asia (FEA) cable system for the purposes of installation, inspection, testing, training and other functions, so as to equip the capacity of the FEA cable system to any level.

On Thursday VSNL filed a writ petition in the Netherlands to set aside this award, the company said on Friday in a statement.

The company said that it would meanwhile comply with the tribunal decision till its award is set aside.

"The company was, and remains, disappointed that the tribunal decided by a 2:1 majority to reject what the company (and, the company believes, many other signatories) had understood to be the effect to the construction and maintenance agreement governing the FLAG Europe Asia cable system," said VSNL.

Late last month, the issue had escalated when FLAG re-appealed to the tribunal accusing the Tatas-owned VSNL of not honouring the court's award and said that negotiations over access charges for use of the landing station had failed. It asked that VSNL come out with "reasonable and cost-based access charges."

Sources close to VSNL said that the company had hoped that negotiations with FLAG would yield a solution. But when that did not happen and FLAG instead decided to re-appeal, VSNL decided to appeal the ruling. The tribunal, while giving the ruling, had provided for a 90-period for negotiations.

Both FLAG and VSNL are competitors in the international telecommunications bandwidth space.