New Delhi: Batting for telcos facing hurdles in raising loans in the wake of 2G scam, Telecom Minister Kapil Sibal on Monday met the Prime Minister and the Finance Minister and sought their intervention to ensure that operators get finances to complete their projects.
"Yes, we met in the morning," Sibal said when asked about his meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee. He, however, declined to give details.
Sources however said they discussed the issue of de-freezing of sanctioning of loans to the telecom companies by banks and other financial institutions.
Earlier this month, Sibal had written to Singh on the the issue saying that if not remedied swiftly this could embroil the sector in a financial and legal quagmire.
There appears no speedy resolution of the 2G scandal, or much scope for interim relief for the industry, given that the Supreme Court is directly supervising the CBI probe.
The reasons for banks not funding some of the new players may not be merely by default fear but also due to the 2G licence issue becoming a scam and the possibility of their licences getting cancelled.
During the probe, financing of new licences had also come under the scrutiny of various agencies.
The CBI has had registered a preliminary inquiry to probe the role of certain public sector banks, including the State Bank of India, for providing loans to certain companies, including Uninor and S Tel, which were allocated 2G Spectrum
in 2007-08.
The preliminary inquiry was registered by the Bank Securities and Fraud Cell of the CBI against unknown bank officials.
The allegation is that some banks had violated laid-down norms and provided finance to two real estate companies which made forays into the telecom market by procuring the spectrum distributed during the period of former Telecom Minister A Raja.
In his letter to the Prime Minister, Sibal had said that "many of the operators have borrowed heavily to pay for the 3G auction fees. They are now facing difficulty in raising resources to undertake the very business that formed the basis of valuation of spectrum."
This needed to be resolved at the earliest, he had said. He had further said that if not addressed this may dent the growth of the telecom sector as a whole, which despite the recent problems, remained an outstanding success story in the country's history.
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