CBI officers carry one of the seven trunks containing pages of the chargesheet at the Patiala House Courts in Delhi on Saturday. Picture by Ramakant Kushwaha.

New Delhi, April 2: The CBI today filed charges against A. Raja and eight others as well as three telecom companies, including Reliance Telecom, in connection with the 2G spectrum scam.

The CBI has pegged the loss from the scam to the exchequer at Rs 30,984.50 crore because of fraudulent allotment of 2G licences.

Besides naming the four earlier accused — Raja, his personal assistant R.K. Chandolia, former telecom secretary Siddharth Behura and Shahid Usman Balwa — the CBI has indicted Vinod Goenka, Gautam Doshi, Surendra Pipara, Hari Nayar and Sanjay Chandra.

Unitech Wireless and Swan Telecom have also been named in the agency’s first chargesheet along with Reliance Telecom.

The comptroller and auditor general had estimated a presumptive loss upto Rs 1.76 lakh crore in the issuance of 2G spectrum licences. The revelation of the scam had pushed the UPA government to the wall and paralysed Parliament.

Raja, Behura, Chandolia and Balwa had been booked for criminal conspiracy, cheating and forgery under the IPC and under the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988.

The same charges also apply to Goenka, director of Swan Telecom, Chandra, the managing director, Unitech Ltd, Doshi, the group managing director of Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani (ADA) Group, Surendra Pipara, group president of Reliance ADA, Hari Nair, senior vice-president of Reliance ADA.

The chargesheet, running into about 80,000 pages, was carried in seven aluminium trunks before the judge .P. Saini in the special designated court, constituted recently for speedy trial.

In January 2008, Raja had granted licences to nine firms — Datacom (now Videcon Telecom), Swan Telecom (now Etisalat DB), Unitech Wireless (now Uninor), Loop Telecom, STel, Allianz, Idea, Aircel and Spice.

The agency first registered a case against unknown officials of the department of telecommunication in October 2009. They swung into action only after being rapped by the Supreme Court for delaying the investigation.

During the probe several top executives of telecom companies including Reliance Communications, Tata Infrastructure, Essar, Loop Telecom, Spice, Aircel and others were grilled.

The agency had also questioned Anil Ambani as his company once held shares in Swan Telecom.

Radia mention

Corporate lobbyist Niira Radia and attorney-general G.E. Vahanvati are among the 125 prosecution witnesses named in the chargesheet.

Vahanvati figures as witness number 32 in the CBI chargesheet while Radia is placed 44th on the list.

Tata & Spice ‘hit’

The CBI has claimed that Tata Tele Services and Spice Communication were hit hard by the collusion of Raja and some industrialists in the allocation of 2G spectrum, PTI reports.

The chargesheet said Tata Tele Services and Spice Communications, which had priority over Swan Telecom in terms of the dual technology approvals, were “unreasonably deprived” spectrum allocation for the Delhi region.