ISLAMABAD: The Supreme Court ordered the government on Wednesday to immediately appoint chairman of the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) and said it would review the matter after a week.

“We direct the secretary concerned to take up the issue immediately and discharge his function by appointing the PTA chairman without further loss of time,” said a three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

The bench had taken up a petition of Khurram Shehzad Chughtai, an information technology expert, who had sought a court order for the government to complete the process of auctioning 3G spectrum licences on an urgent basis in a transparent manner and ensure early availability of the services. He suggested that the proceeds of the auction should be deposited in the federal treasury.

The telecommunication sector is running without any regulator as the post of PTA chairman has been lying vacant since February, affecting the government’s high priority agenda of introducing the third generation cellphone network in the country.

In his budget speech in the National Assembly on June 12, Finance Minister Ishaq Dar had said the government was expecting to receive Rs120 billion from the proposed sale of 3G licences.

The 3G technology operates at a higher frequency and larger channel bandwidth and supports data transfer at up to two megabytes per second. On Wednesday, Deputy Attorney General Imran-ul-Haq informed the court that Syed Ismail Shah, a PhD, had been appointed as acting chairman of the PTA.

But the court reminded him that there was no concept of acting chairman under Section 3 of the Pakistan Telecommunication Reorganisation Act 1996. In the absence of a chairman, all decisions taken by the PTA would have no legal value, it observed.

The DAG said the government had already issued a schedule for introducing the 3G technology in the country and acknowledged that $800 million was still outstanding against privatisation proceeds of the Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL).

Ismail Shah was appointed as a member of the three-man PTA body and later elevated to the post of acting chairman under a notification issued on Sept 26. One of the members, former law secretary Mohammad Raza Khan, was given additional charge of the member law of the PTA. He was replaced by Barrister Zafarullah Khan as law secretary.

While dictating the order, the chief justice regretted that despite earlier directives, the federal government functionaries had failed to appoint a permanent chairman of the PTA.

The government did not make any change despite the fact that Raza Khan had been substituted in the law ministry, the court said, adding that it failed to understand the reluctance on part of the functionaries to discharge their duties. The hearing was adjourned for a week.