To Pay or Not To Pay – SMART and P.U.C. to Settle Money Matters before C.C.J.

This morning in the Court of Appeal, Speednet Telecommunications Limited, the parent company for SMART, filed a leave to appeal to the Caribbean Court of Justice.  The matter is to settle, once and for all, a legal dispute that has gone in favour of SMART at the Supreme Court level and against the company when the Public Utilities Commission later appealed the ruling.  Last year, the Court of Appeal overturned a Supreme Court judgment made by Justice Michelle Arana who ruled that the P.U.C. could not collect fees without granting a full license to SMART.  The P.U.C. claims that SMART owes some one point four million dollars in fees for the use of its seven hundred-megahertz frequency bandwidth – an agreement which the monitoring agency had first granted in 2001.  But there should have been the granting of a subsequent license, which was not done.  The two parties will end up before the C.C.J., which will decide whether or not SMART must pay the spectrum fees.  Speednet’s legal team has maintained that the P.U.C. gave the company permission to use the bandwidth, under the understanding that there would be some level of regularizing it in the future.  But that time never came and now the P.U.C. wants what it deems is legitimate fees due to them.  Senior Counsel Fred Lumor and Sheena Pitts are the attorneys for the P.U.C.; Senior Counsel, Eamon Courtenay and Priscilla Banner are the attorneys for Speednet.