The Russian Ministry of Communications is revamping its rules for revoking operator licences of companies that fail to perform as promised. The Law on Communications, which came into force last year, stipulates that if a company does not perform according to its licence, it can be revoked. But there has been no exact legal procedure for this, and so far only five of 112 such licence holders have been punished this way, said Minister of Communications Vladimir Bulgak. Recently, the first companies to suffer have been identified. The Ministry said four companies have been stripped of their licences for failing to offer services on time. The four are the State Enterprise for Communications and Information of the Kaliningrad region, which, along with its licence for operating the region’s public telephone network, loses its licence to build and run an overlay network in Kaliningrad. TOO RTS of Saratov loses the right to build and operate an AMPS-800 cellular telephone network in Saratov and the cities of the surrounding region. AOZT SpaceInform of Kaliningrad loses its licence to offer inter-city and international telephone services, and TO Communications Centre of Nizhny Novgorod is stripped of a licence to provide international communications services, which should have started in November 1994. At the Ministry’s next meeting, the licence committee will consider annulling 20 to 30 licences, all for cellular communications. Even if a cellular operator does not start working, it formally engages part of the radio spectrum, preventing the Ministry from granting a licence to a potential competitor.
