By IANS,
New Delhi : Shares of telecom giant Bharti Airtel Monday fell 4.43 percent in morning trade at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) following raids at its office by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) Saturday.
The CBI Saturday raided Bharti Airtel office in Gurgaon, another telecom firm Vodafone’s offices in Mumbai and Delhi and the houses of two former telecom officials after the agency filed a new case in allocation of additional 2G spectrum when the late Pramod Mahajan was telecom minister during the NDA government.
The agency has also registered a case against unknown officials of Department of Telecommunication.
The Bharti scrip slipped 4.43 percent to an intra-day low of Rs.386 in morning trade at the BSE. It later recovered and was ruling 1.26 percent down at Rs.392.65 around noon.
The probe agency had registered the case against the telecom major Thursday evening for alleged irregularities in the grant of additional spectrum and causing a loss of approximately Rs.508.22 crore to the exchequer during the period 2001 and 2007.
According to CBI, the officials with the approval of Mahajan allegedly took a wrong decision on January 2001 to allocate additional spectrum beyond 6.2 megahertz in violation of the Technical Committee’s report.
They also allocated the companies spectrum till 10 megahertz at the fee of an incremental one percent adjusted gross revenue (AGR), instead of charging two percent of AGR for beyond 6.2 megahertz.
According to the norms prevailing at the time, till 8 megahertz, the company should have been charged two percent.