BTRC to serve final notice to cancel Citycell licence

Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission has decided to serve a final notice for licence cancellation to Citycell because of its failure to pay the government Tk 246 crore in dues.
BTRC officials said that the notice, which would be issued giving a specific timeframe to respond, would ask the operator to explain why its licence would not be cancelled The commission took the decision at a meeting, led by its chairman Sunil Kanti Bose, on Monday.
‘A final notice is the first step to cancel a licence. If Citycell fails to pay the entire outstanding dues in the stipulated time then we will cancel the licence of the operator,’ a senior BTRC official told New Age on Tuesday.

He said the BTRC would also take legal action under Public Demand Recovery Act to realise the dues from Citycell.
‘We are yet to set the deadline of Citycell’s response as the commission took the decision yesterday. In such cases, usually we give 15 to 30 days from the notice date to give reply,’ he said.
BTRC officials said Citycell had dues on several accounts including the spectrum charge of 2G licence and annual fees.
They also said that a minor portion of the dues also came into the account as the operator did not share revenue properly.
‘The major part of the dues came from 2G spectrum and annual fess, which is around Tk 230 crore. In total Citycell has Tk 246 crore in dues to the government,’ another BTRC official told New Age.
He also said BTRC had issued six letters since December, 2013 to Citycell for the payment of the dues but did not receive any response from the operator.
As the first mobile telecom operator, Citycell started its operation in 1993 with CDMA technology.
The operator intended to move to the widely-used GSM technology but the BTRC rejected the proposal on the ground that the company had huge amount of dues, said officials.
According to the company web site, Singapore’s SingTel owns 44.54 per cent shares of  Citycell, Pacific Motors Ltd 37.95 per cent and Far East Telecom owns 17.51 per cent stake of the company.
The latest data of BTRC showed the operator had 13.49 lakh active subscribers in September.