The Special CBI Court today acquitted Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and former Telecom Secretary Shyamal Ghosh in the excess spectrum allocation case dating back to 2002.

Special CBI Judge OP Saini observed that the CBI tried to mislead the court by filing a charge-sheet that was distorted and fabricated, based on deliberately redacted and garbled facts. “It has been so drafted to create an impression of a grave crime, where there is none. An attempt has been made to create an impression in the charge-sheet that everything was done on a single day in the dark hours of January 31, 2002. There is no doubt that the charge-sheet has been filed for extraneous reasons,” the court said.

The CBI had alleged that the telecom companies were given additional spectrum beyond 6.2 MHz at a lower price which cost the exchequer nearly ₹846 crore. The operators were given additional spectrum based on a subscriber-linked criteria by paying 1 per cent of their revenue as licence fee. The CBI felt this should have been at least 2 per cent. The CBI had alleged that Bharti and Vodafone (then known as Sterling Cellular and Hutchison Max) were the beneficiaries of the Department of Telecommunication’s decision, on January 31, 2002, to allocate additional spectrum beyond 6.2 Mhz. It said that the then Telecom Minister, the late Pramod Mahajan, and Shyamal Ghosh had shown undue haste in clearing the proposal though a technical committee report said the operators would not need more than 6.2 MHz for another 30 months.

The technical committee had also recommended that additional spectrum be allotted only after the operators reached a subscriber base of 9 lakh. The DoT reduced it to 4 lakh.

Dismissing the charges, the court said that the CBI withheld crucial documents from the charge-sheet to make it look like a conspiracy. The court has directed the CBI to conduct an inquiry into the erring officials for making an attempt to mislead the court.

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