Former Telecom Secretary Dinesh Shankar Mathur, a key prosecution witness in the 2G spectrum allocation case, is likely to depose before a Delhi court on Monday.
Former Telecom Secretary Dinesh Shankar Mathur, a key prosecution witness in the 2G spectrum allocation case, is likely to depose before a Delhi court on Monday.
Mathur's deposition before Special CBI Judge O P Saini assumes significance as he, in his statement to the CBI, had said it was former Telecom Minister A Raja who had decided to prepone the cut-off date for the receipt of new applications for Unified Access Services Licences (UASL).
Earlier, October 1, 2007 was fixed as the last date for receiving applications, but it was preponed to September 25.
The CBI had alleged that Raja, in collusion with others, had decided to keep September 25, 2007 as the cut-off date for considering the applications for UASL to "wrongly benefit" Unitech Ltd MD Sanjay Chandra and Swan Telecom promoters Shahid Usman Balwa and Vinod Goenka -- all facing trial in the case.
Mathur, a 1971 batch IAS officer who had joined as the telecom secretary in July 2006 and retired from the post on December 31, 2007, had said that Raja decided to prepone the cut-off date to be September 25, 2007 without having any reasonable justification.
"It was also decided by A Raja on this date that Letter of Intent (LoIs) may be issued to the applicants, who applied by September 25, 2007. When I came back from tour, this note of the minister was put to me on November 3, 2007.
"In my opinion, this could have given rise to legal implications because the department (DoT) did not have any reasonable justification for arbitrarily fixing the cut off date as September 25, 2007," Mathur had told the CBI in his statement recorded on December 16, 2010.
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