Manoj Modi, a top lieutenant of RIL Chief, Mr Mukesh Ambani, and five others have been summoned by a special CBI court here in a case relating to masking of international calls as local and causing substantial revenue loss to the exchequer.
The Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate has asked these officials of erstwhile Reliance Infocomm, a company that was rechristened as Reliance Communications after it was transferred from Mr Mukesh to younger brother Mr Anil Ambani as part of family settlement in 2005, to appear before it on August 3.
Apart from Modi, who was a director of Reliance Infocomm, Akhil Gupta, the then CEO business development, Shankar Adaval, President Corporate Affairs, Pankaj Pawar, Head of Regulatory, and two other officials K.R. Raja and B.D. Khurana have also been summoned.
In its FIR registered in August 2006, CBI had named Reliance Infocomm, represented by then board of directors, Modi, Gupta, Adaval, Panwar and unknown others.
It alleged that the company had indulged in conspiracy, counterfeiting records, altering digital records and breaching licence conditions and hacking with computers besides others.
CBI had invoked sections 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 20-A (breach of licence), and sections of India Telegraph Act and Information Technology Act relating to hacking with computer system.
The chargesheet said that the accused persons intentionally tampered with the working of the telegraph network of the company and presented calls directly in the local network with a dishonest intention of defrauding the central government.
It may be recalled that Reliance Infocomm had under protest paid a fine of Rs 150 crore imposed by telecom tribunal TDSAT in 2005 in this connection.
According to CBI, the company had masked incoming international calls as local ones through one of the three gateways — Chennai, Kolkata and Mumbai. The calls were put on the Public System Telephone Network as local. This was done, CBI sources said, with the help of specially designed software and accomplices in BSNL.
According to the chargesheet, the company transmitted over 7.52 crore minutes of international long distance calls with manipulated CLI during May 2004 to September 2004, evading Access Deficit Charges to the tune of Rs 32 crore.
Private telecom operators have to pay the state-owned telecom giant BSNL or MTNL a minimum of Rs 4.75 and a maximum of Rs 5.65 per minute on every incoming international call as ADC. Against this, according to the chargesheet, the firm was paying a minimum of Rs 0.30 to a maximum of Rs 2.20 per minute, a rate applicable for local calls.