Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio has fired off a letter to the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) denouncing the industry forum for taking sides in the controversial issue over unpaid telecom licence fee dues of legacy players such as Airtel and Vodafone Idea.
Last week, the Supreme Court handed down a verdict upholding the department of telecom’s demand notices to 15 telecom players directing them to pay up licence fee dues estimated at a combined Rs 92,600 crore within the next three months. The verdict ended a nearly two decades long dispute between the telecom players and the DoT over the formula for calculating licence fee dues, interest and penalties.
The COAI waded into the controversy when it wrote to the DoT late last night in which it had apparently raised serious concerns about the payout obligations of the legacy telecom players and had warned the government of disaster if stress-ridden Airtel and Vodafone collapsed under the burden of these payments.
In a letter written to Ranjan S. Mathew, Reliance Jio slammed the director-general of COAI for his “alarmist propaganda”.
Jio took exception to the midnight letter that COAI had written and accused the industry body of acting as a “mouthpiece of two service providers”.
The Ambani firm charged COAI with unseemly haste in issuing the letter without taking into account Jio’s views.
“We fail to understand the need and undue haste in issuing this letter in the midnight. This is a serious breach of trust on your part,” the letter said.
Jio took umbrage to COAI’s contention that ambitious government programmes will suffer” if it did not bail out the two operators.
“We disagree with the threatening and blackmailing tone of the COAI,” Jio said.
The letter went on to add that the “failure of the two operators, even in the unlikely event of it actually happening, will not have an impact on the sector dynamics with existence of vibrant competition of the public sector units (PSUs) and there is no restriction on entry by new operators.”
Jio also slammed its rivals for persisting with below cost tariffs even when there was no competitive pressure. “These operators have the capacity and enough monetisation possibilities to comfortably pay government dues,” Jio said.
Mathews on Wednesday said: “This is a private matter between the members and will be addressed within the COAI’s governance structure.”