Oil India moves SC against DoT seeking Rs 48,000 cr payment

New Delhi: State-owned Oil India Ltd (OIL) on Wednesday said it has filed a clarificatory/modificatory petition in the Supreme Court against a Rs 48,000 crore demand raised by the telecom department on cumulative revenue of Rs 1.47 crore it had earned on an NLD telecom licence. Following the October 24 Supreme Court ruling that non-telecom revenues of telecom firms such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea should be included for considering payments of government dues, the telecom department asked OIL to pay Rs 48,000 crore in principal dues together with interest and penalty. The dues sought are double the net worth of OIL.

"OIL had obtained a National Long Distance Service Licence (NLD Licence) to establish Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition System (SCADA System) for control, management, and protection of OIL's pipeline network used for transportation of crude oil, natural gas, and petroleum products," the company said in a statement.

The NLD licence is predominantly used for the SCADA system and only the spare bandwidth capacity is leased out to other telecom operators. "As per the licence terms, licence fee is to be paid on gross total revenue from services provided under the NLD licence. Since the award of NLD licence, the cumulative revenue of Rs 1.47 crore is earned by OIL from the leasing of spare bandwidth capacity on which all applicable licence fee and other statutory dues as per licence terms have been paid by OIL regularly," it said.

The company said based on the recent Supreme Court judgment "Department of Telecommunications (DoT) issued demand notices to OIL also seeking payment of licence fee on total reported revenue including revenue from sale of crude oil, natural gas etc, which neither relate to the NLD licence nor can be treated as supplementary/ value-added services related to the NLD licence."