New Delhi, Jul 14: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), probing into alleged irregularities of spectrum allocation during NDA's regime, has given a clean chit to former telecom minister Arun Shourie, reports ‘The Indian Express'.
Shourie, who was the telecom minister between 2003 and 2004 when the NDA was in power, was examined by CBI last year but the agency did not find any ‘criminality' committed during his tenure, said officials.
The agency is also learnt to have intimated the Supreme Court about the status of preliminary enquiry (PE) registered against Shourie on the orders of the apex court. The agency said there was no prima facie evidence against him.
The agency was asked by the apex court to investigate the grant of licences to telecom firms between 2001 to 2007, which included Shourie's tenure.
Earlier, Shourie has clarified on the “first-come first-serve” policy which was formulated during his tenure.
The CBI's status report based on the examination of Shourie says that “in fact Shourie tried to auction spectrum despite the FCFS policy to explore revenue generation, but there were not many takers for spectrum at that time. So he allotted licences on FCFS basis in Northeast, Assam and Jammu and Kashmir where there were no takers”.
The agency during its year-long probe also examined DoT files and witnesses and came across few instances of procedural lapses. There was no ‘malafide' intention to commit any irregularities. “We have sent a report on it to the department of telecommunications on the concerned irregularity and it is up to them to take any appropriate action,” said a CBI official.
The lapses, according to the CBI, relates to the issue migration of CDMA licences to Unified Access Service licence where certain tweaking in the recommendations were done by the then TRAI chairman Pradip Baijal but it was without any malafide intention. Further, around 50 licences were also issued during Shourie's tenure through the first-come-first-served criteria, which the UPA had said caused loss to the exchequer.
“Baijal tweaked the recommendations on the multi-stage bidding process for new entrants to the Unified Access Service licences regime but this irregularity was without any malafide intent and thus Baijal is only liable for departmental action,” said CBI official.
