The telecom regulator has decided to serve a final show-cause notice to the mobile phone operator Citycell stating why its licence should not be canceled if it fails to pay around Tk250 crore dues.
The notice asking the operator to reply in 10 days was issued under the Bangladesh Telecommunication Act.
“We have decided to serve a show-cause letter to Citycell as it has failed to pay its dues to BTRC,” Md Abdus Samad, the regulator’s legal commissioner, told the Dhaka Tribune over phone yesterday.
CityCell said they had not received the notice yet.
“We got the news from journalists, but are yet to receive the notice,” Mehbub Chowdhury, chief executive officer of Citycell, said.
He said they would try to manage it through discussion with Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC).
Citycell received such notices from BTRC before and responded paying Tk26 crore in March.
At that time the total amount of dues was Tk255.3 crore including Tk229 crore of 2G licence renewal
fee and Tk4.78 crore of social obligation fee.
The operator sought time till September to pay the rest of the dues.
But in the meantime the dues increased to nearly Tk250 crore as revenue sharing amount from March last year was added.
CItycell sources said they had already discussed the matter in their meetings and were ready to pay the outstanding amounts without 2G spectrum fee.
The officials alleged Citycell never received full of spectrum allocation BTRC made to it. For this reason they won’t pay full dues.
“Though we were allocated 10 Megahertz of spectrum, we got 6.5 Megahertz in two years,” said a senior executive of the operator also said.
BTRC sources said according to the decision if the regulator fails to pay the money, process will start to cancel licence.
Citycell came into operation in 1993 and currently has a subscriber base of 13.49 lakh as of September, lowest among the operators in Bangladesh. It currently holds 1.23% market share.
Back in July 2010, the operator had around 20 lakh subscribers and enjoyed 3.23% market share.
“We are waiting for a feedback from Citycell before recommending government to cancel licence,” another senior official of BTRC said.
He said the regulator has to think about the interest of subscribers and releasing dues at the same time.
“We can file case under public fund recovery act against Citycell authorities,” he added.
For last few years Citycell has been trying to inject new fund for survival in the market. However, they have so far failed to manage any foreign investment.
Citycell currently has 44.54% shares owned by SingTel Asia Pacific Investment Pet Ltd, 37.95% by Pacific Motors Limited shares and 17.51% by Far East Telecom Limited.
Citycell’s revenue in FY2012-13 was Tk267.63 crore ($344m), declining from Tk347.04 crore ($351m) in FY2011-12, according to BTRC data.
The operator made no investment in FY2012-13 while in FY2011-12 it had a Tk490.39 crore ($637m) investment in the market.
