With the Supreme Court Decision on cancelling the fraudulently awarded 2G Licences, we are seeing the foreign companies that bought into the licence winners cheaply are now trying to “protect” their “investment” by threatening to sue the Indian Government. Foremost among these companies is TELENOR the Norwegian Telecom Company that invested in UNINOR.
Government has not said anything on this so far, surprisingly, since if this had been an Indian then all kind of warnings, actions would have been taken against the company.
This is a simple case of Telenor investing in a company that has broken the law and got the 2G licences and now has been caught. If the same thing had happened in Norway or any part of the “developed world”, would that country’s Government return the investment made by the foreign company? It would have been treated at a business risk that the foreign company did not do proper due diligence before investing and in fact the blame would also fall on the foreign company.
Just because we have a lazy & corrupt system, everybody thinks they can take India for a ride. Telenor was not in India for charity, they were here for business, to earn profit & when they invested in Uninor they knew that the 2G licences where obtained very cheaply (just look at the difference in the price at which Uninor got the licences and price Telenor paid to get a stake in the company), shouldn’t that have rung a bell in the ethics department or the corporate headquarters of Telenor? I bet they would have thought that with India being so corrupt they can get away with this, unfortunately this case came into spotlight in spite of efforts by all involved to hush it up. And even Supreme Court lived up to the expectations and gave a brave decision.
If at all, Telenor has claim against only Unitech, it’s partner in Uninor, for “hiding” facts/cheating…
All this talk about foreign investment drying up because of this judgement is frankly “bull-shit”. Considering the wealth of people in India, it is a surprise that Government is encouraging Foreign Investments rather than Domestic Investments… Probably it is to help the corrupt few to gave more, this time legally!!!