The Supreme Court on Monday adjourned the hearing to October 13, in a plea by Vodafone Idea seeking relief from additional Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) demands raised by the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) for the period up to FY 2016-17.
A bench of Chief Justice of India BR Gavai, Justices K Vinod Chandran, adjourned the matter after Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, requested the apex court to defer the hearing.
Vodafone’s plea sought directions to quash the additional demand for AGR dues, arguing that it pertained to the pre-2016-17 period, which the Supreme Court’s earlier ruling had settled.
It further sought to direct the telecom department to comprehensively reassess and reconcile all AGR dues based on the ‘Deduction Verification Guidelines’ issued on February 3, 2020.
“The action of DoT was completely unjust, unfair and arbitrary in seeking to raise additional demands despite the Supreme Court having crystallised the AGR dues and not carrying out a complete re-assessment since, while DoT is at liberty to raise additional demands, the petitioner is not being permitted to seek correction of assessments made by DoT which have been thrusted upon the petitioner,” the petition stated.
The telecom company claimed that errors in computation have led to duplication of entries, with certain amounts added more than once.
By the October 2019 judgement, telecoms were asked by the apex court to pay AGR dues. In September 2020, the Supreme Court granted telecom companies a 10-year period to settle their pending AGR dues to the Central government, with a 10 per cent payment to be made annually.
The deadline given to the telcos for the first instalment was March 31, 2021. In July 2021, the Supreme Court had dismissed the plea of telecom majors, including Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, seeking correction of errors in the calculation of AGR dues payable by them as per the top court’s 2019 judgement.
(This report has been published as part of the auto-generated syndicate wire feed. Apart from the headline, no editing has been done in the copy by ABP Live.)
