Bharti Airtel has moved the Supreme Court (SC) asking for a modification in its order so that the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) can finalise its assessment of AGR dues immediately after taking into account the representations produced by several telcos. The DoT table on the dues from several telcos the SC judgment cites is titled: “Amounts recoverable from major TSPs as per preliminary assessments”, and a clarification was offered at the finish of the table that stated: “All dues are subject to further revisions due to departmental assessments, CAG audits, Special Audits, Court Cases etc”.
The “preliminary assessments”, on the other hand, got treated as final by the SC when, on March 18 final year — the original order was provided on October 24, 2019, — it ruled that “no exercise of self-assessment/re-assessment to be done and the dues which were placed before us have to be paid as we have affirmed these dues, including interest and penalty as ordered in the judgment”.
While DoT had estimated that Bharti Airtel owed Rs 43,980 crore, when Airtel’s personal estimate place the dues at Rs 13,004 crore. For Vodafone Idea, the numbers had been Rs 58,254 crore against its self-assessment of Rs 21,533 crore when for Tata Teleservices, DoT estimates pegged the quantity at Rs 16,798 crore against Rs 2,197 crore. According to Airtel, DoT has produced several arithmetical errors in its calculations and the influence of this is considerable. For each and every 1 rupee added that DoT has stated a telco owes, thanks to interest and penalties — and interest on penalties — outcomes in AGR dues obtaining inflated by up to eight instances based upon the year to which it pertains.
“There are a number of apparent arithmetic errors in DoT’s demands, such as duplications in revenue addition, errors of omission and errors of commission, which have nothing to do with the inclusion or exclusion of a particular head of revenue (taking the heads of revenue as final as per the AGR judgement dated October 24, 2019),” the firm stated in its affidavit. Airtel stated this was ex facie, a error by this court as the stated judgment dated October 24, 2019, does not dealt with or refer to the quantity of the dues payable.