{"id":137941,"date":"2024-09-19T13:40:31","date_gmt":"2024-09-19T13:40:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/19\/supreme-court-rejects-telcos-plea-on-agr-dues-owed-to-government\/"},"modified":"2024-09-19T13:40:31","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T13:40:31","slug":"supreme-court-rejects-telcos-plea-on-agr-dues-owed-to-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/2024\/09\/19\/supreme-court-rejects-telcos-plea-on-agr-dues-owed-to-government\/","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Rejects Telcos’ Plea on AGR Dues Owed to Government"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Supreme<\/div>


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India’s top court on Thursday rejected a request by telecom companies to recalculate the dues they owed the government, sending shares of debt-saddled Vodafone Idea and its peers down.<\/p>\n

Analysts at ICRA estimate that Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel owe 1 trillion rupees ($12 billion) in past dues, including spectrum charges and licensing fees. They, however, did not shed light on the amount owed by other companies.<\/p>\n

The companies, in a last-resort petition against a similar ruling by the top court in 2021, had argued that the telecom department made errors in calculating the so-called adjusted gross revenue (AGR) dues.<\/p>\n

Telecom firms had long contested that only revenue accrued from core services should be taken into account when computing the dues, while the government argued that AGR should include non-core revenue as well, such as money from rent or land sales.<\/p>\n

The Supreme Court had, in 2019, ruled in favour of the government’s definition of AGR calculations.<\/p>\n

The latest ruling is a setback for Vodafone Idea, which owes the government around 700 billion rupees in license fees and spectrum charges, according to its latest quarterly report.<\/p>\n

The Indian government is also one of the largest shareholders in the company with a 23.1% stake.<\/p>\n

Analysts did not expect the ruling to have a major impact on Bharti Airtel due to its stronger financials.<\/p>\n

Shares of Vodafone Idea slumped about 20% after the news, while Bharti Airtel briefly turned negative, but closed 0.6% higher.<\/p>\n

“A positive ruling would have reduced Vodafone’s debt by 350 billion rupees,” said Balaji Subramanian, a research analyst at IIFL Securities.<\/p>\n

The ruling makes Vodafone’s debt-funding (250 bln rupee) challenging since lesser cash flow would worry banks about taking exposure to the company, he said.<\/p>\n

“If the relief had come, their annual cash flow would be higher by 80 billion rupees.”<\/p>\n

Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel did not immediately respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.<\/p>\n

\u00a9 Thomson Reuters 2024<\/em><\/p>\n

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)<\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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India’s top court on Thursday rejected a request by telecom companies to recalculate the dues they owed the government, sending shares of debt-saddled Vodafone Idea and its peers down. Analysts at ICRA estimate that Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel owe 1 trillion rupees ($12 billion) in past dues, including spectrum charges and licensing fees. They, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137942,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/i.gadgets360cdn.com\/large\/supreme_court_reuters_1598948833290.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[607],"tags":[110329,110328,4582,1625,18532,3954,9358,5851,1733,1624,1617,110327,45806,23659],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137941"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137941"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137941\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":137943,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137941\/revisions\/137943"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137942"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.talkwithrattan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}