DoT’s Rs 48k cr demand: Oil India Ltd moves SC

Following the October 24 SC ruling non-telecom revenues of telecom firms such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea should be included for considering payments of government dues, the telecom department asked OIL to pay Rs 48,000 cr in principal dues together with interest and penalty. The dues sought are double the net worth of OIL. “OIL had obtained a National Long Distance Service Licence (NLD Licence) to establish Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA System) for control, management, and protection of OIL’s pipeline network used for transportation of crude oil, natural gas, and petroleum products,” the company said in a statement.

The NLD licence is predominantly used for the SCADA system and only the spare bandwidth capacity is leased out to other telecom operators.

“As per the licence terms, licence fee is to be paid on gross total revenue from services provided under the NLD licence. Since the award of NLD licence, the cumulative revenue of Rs 1.47 crore is earned by OIL from the leasing of spare bandwidth capacity on which all applicable licence fee and other statutory dues as per licence terms have been paid by OIL regularly,” it said.

It said based on the recent SC judgment, “Department of Telecommunications issued demand notices to OIL also seeking payment of licence fee on total reported revenue including revenue from sale of crude oil, natural gas etc, which neither relate to the NLD licence nor can be treated as supplementary/ value-added services related to the NLD licence.”