A local court will hear charges against top executives of Reliance alleging they masked international calls as local calls to evade payment of fee to the exchequer.
The court, in early July, had summoned Manoj Modi, an associate of Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, Akhil Gupta, Shankar Adawal, Pankaj Panwar, K R Raju and Bhagwan Das Khurana of the erstwhile Reliance Infocomm Ltd.
The chargesheet was filed four years after CBI took up investigations and five years after Reliance Infocomm paid Rs 150 crore towards penalty imposed by telecom tribunal TDSAT.
The company is now controlled by Mukesh’s younger brother Anil who got it as part of the division of the Reliance businesses and it has since been renamed Reliance Communications. The officials named in the chargesheet are no longer with the telecom arm.
The CBI filed the chargesheet in July before the Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate, Egmore, Chennai, under 120-B (criminal conspiracy), 20-A (breach of licence), 21 (unauthorised telegraph) and 25-C (intentionally damaging or tampering with telegraphs) of the Indian Telegraph Act.
The company is also charged under sections 65 (tampering with computer source documents), 66 (hacking with computer system), 85 (contravention of any of the provisions) of the Information Technology Act.
The case relates to manipulation and tampering of calling lines identification of ISD calls by Reliance Infocomm Ltd and thereby, passing off international calls as local calls and causing a loss to the government and its PSUs, BSNL and MTNL, to the tune of several crores of rupees.
