Harbinger Capital Partners, the largest investor of LightSquared,...
Harbinger Capital Partners, the largest investor of LightSquared, filed a complaint Friday against the U.S. government for allegedly breaching its contractual commitment to permit Harbinger to build out, deploy and operate a mobile broadband network using LightSquared’s spectrum. The U.S.…
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“has taken Harbinger’s property without just compensation,” Harbinger said in its complaint filed in with the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. The FCC proposed to revoke LightSquared’s conditional waiver to provide a terrestrial network in 2012. Although the FCC conditionally approved LightSquared’s technical waiver application for terrestrial-only handsets in 2011, it “halted deployment of Harbinger’s nationwide mobile broadband network by requiring LightSquared for the first time to address and resolve the GPS industry’s belatedly raised receiver overload concern,” it said. The FCC fully understood that the GPS receiver overload problem was “an inexorable consequence of the very thing the United States had made a contractual condition in its negotiations with Harbinger -- a national, mobile broadband network operating using LightSquared’s spectrum,” Harbinger said. As a result of the government’s actions, LightSquared wasn’t able to renew financing, lost contracting partners and eventually was rendered unable to continue operating, it said. Harbinger requests its full and reasonable damages and just compensation “in an amount to be proven at trial,” it said.