The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on Tuesday placed before the Supreme Court the report of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which said it was not possible to predict with certainty the precise value of 2G spectrum that would have emerged in auction during 2001-08.
The report, which was placed before a Bench comprising Justices G.S. Singhvi and H.L. Dattu, said it was a “tricky” exercise to estimate the annual value of spectrum for eight years.
The Bench, which was hearing the bail pleas of two of the accused in the 2G spectrum scam, had on Monday said that it would like to go through the TRAI report after senior advocate Ram Jethmalani had submitted that the telecom regulator in its report had found that there was no loss in the allocation of spectrum.
The report said “retrospectively estimating annual value of spectrum in the 1800 MHz band for eight years between 2001 and 2008 is a tricky exercise at the best of times. Access to data is crucially important, but equally, if not more important is access to business plans and forecasts of service providers who invest in the market.
“We do not have access to the latter information and even the data that we have is inadequate, as documented in our report. We, therefore conduct the exercise of estimating market value of spectrum under severe data constraints and a changing technological environment.”
