A day after it questioned the Government’s decision to slap a penalty of Rs 150 crore for routing international long distance (ILD) calls as local, Reliance Infocomm was today ordered by the Supreme Court to pay another Rs 84.7 crore to BSNL on the same issue.The latest liability, imposed by a bench comprising Justice N Santosh Hegde and Justice S B Sinha, is in addition to the payment of Rs 98 crore already made by Reliance Infocomm partly on BSNL’s demand and partly on an interim order passed by the Delhi HC.BSNL’s charge that Reliance Infocomm was causing heavy revenue losses prompted Justice Sinha to observe: ‘‘What is is this big scale fraud going on?’’ Today’s setback to Reliance Infocomm came after the SC expressed two key concerns:• The division bench of the High Court, while restraining BSNL on November 5 from disconnecting Reliance calls, glossed over a damaging observation that a single judge of the same court had given the previous day. Holding that Reliance Infocomm had come with ‘‘unclean hands,’’ Justice Vikramjit Sen ruled on November 4 that it had conducted its business activities ‘‘in dishonest breach’’ of the agreement in question.The Supreme Court disapproved the failure of the division bench, headed by Justice Vijender Jain, to deal with Justice Sen’s adverse remarks before giving any relief to Reliance Infocomm.• Though there have already been two rounds of litigation, Reliance Infocomm is yet to come clean on whether it has stopped tampering with calling line identification (CLI), which is at the root of the whole controversy over its home country direct (HCD) service launched in the US.This despite the fact that the division bench of the High Court directed it to file an affidavit saying that it had ‘‘actually disconnected the HCD features’’ and that it would ‘‘not route the ILD calls with wrong CLI.’’But the affidavit filed by Reliance Infocomm on November 19 skirted the CLI issue. It simply said that since September 15, ‘‘all traffic from HCD service of the petitioner is being routed on ILD trunk route.’’The licence condition says that the CLI shall ‘‘nev-er be tampered as the same is also required for security purposes and any violation of this amounts to breach of security.’’ The apex court underlined the need to comply with this condition.
