Former telecom minister A. Raja broke the law of his own ministry, tried to bully his own officials and mislead Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in one biggest scam in independent India, which cost the nation `1.76 lakh crores.
Mr Raja gave new telecom licences in 2008 at the price of 2001 despite the fact that in between the size of the telecom market had increased and there were international players who wanted a pie of India’s growing mobile market. Infact, Prime Minister wrote to Mr Raja to consider the route of auction to give new licences. However, Mr Raja ignored all these advises.
In order to give cheap licences to some of his alleged favourite companies, majority of which were from real estate, Mr Raja allegedly arbitrarily reduced the cut off date by which the application for the new licences would be received.
He had first announced that the department will receive application up to October 1, 2007 for the new telecom licences, but later on cut it down to September 25.
“Actually he had never anticipated that there will be such a rush for the new licences so he cut down the date so that some favourite could make up,” said government sources.
He also changed the first come first serves policy of the telecom department by which licences were issued. Some of applicants had prior information that the policy will be changed and had made demand drafts having dates prior to the day when the policy was announced. These new companies were issued licences in January 2008.
However, things began to go wrong for Mr Raja when companies which had received cheap licences for `1,650 crores struck deals in 2008 with foreign companies, selling stake at several times the price at which they had got the spectrum.