The
House of Representatives yesterday approved the sale of Nigerian
Telecommunications Ltd (NITEL) and its mobile arm, MTEL, to the NATCOM
Consortium.
The approval was given after the House
adopted the report of its Committees on Telecommunications and
Privatization and Commercialization which gave a clean bill of the
health to the processes that led to the liquidation and acquisition of
NITEL and MTEL.
The committees, which were mandated by
the plenary to investigate the transactions some months ago, submitted
its findings yesterday after several public hearings.
It will be recalled that after four
unsuccessful attempts between 2001 and 2011, the National Council on
Privatization, in February 2012, directed the Bureau of Public
Enterprises, BPE, to privatize the companies through a guided
liquidation process.
The NATCOM Consortium was one of the 17
companies that submitted Expressions of Interest, EOI, when the bid was
advertised in June 2014.
Following prequalification, two
companies, NATCOM and NATTAG Consortium, qualified for the next stage
and were invited to submit a technical and financial bid for the
companies’ assets. NATCOM accompanied its bid with the mandatory Bid
Bond of $10 million as stipulated in the Liquidators Request for
Proposal.
NATTAG was said to have failed to comply
and was subsequently disqualified from the process . At a public
ceremony December 2014, where the financial and technical bids were
opened, NATCOM, with a bid of $252.25million, emerged as the winner of
the bid.
The House of Representatives stepped in
to investigate the transaction after pockets of protest by some people
who felt the transaction needed to be looked into.
The committees’ reports, which the House
adopted yesterday, said that the BPE enforced due process and
transparency in the course of the transaction.
The report, read to the House by
Honorable Saheed Akinlade Fijabi, the Chairman of House Committee on
Communications, reads in part:
“That the Bureau of Public Enterprise,
BPE, in enforcing due process, transparency and adopting procedure in
line with international best practice during the entire sale process
should adopt and apply such procedure in future privatization
exercise.”
In the report, the House called on the
Nigerian Communications Commission, NCC, to meet “its obligations and
commitments to the Bureau of Public Enterprises and core investor
(NATCOM) in line with the presidential approval on licences and spectrum
for the effective take-off of NITEL and MTEL.”
The report also urged the Federal
Government to encourage the NATCOM Consortium by creating an enabling
environment that will make NITEL and MTEL to compete with other telecom
companies in the country.
0 comments:
Post a Comment