DUSHANBE, MARCH 31 2017 (The Conway Bulletin) — Telia, the Swedish telecoms company, accused Tajikistan’s government of effectively blocking the $39m sale of mobile unit Tcell to the Aga Khan, an accusation that will undermine Western business confidence in the country.
The Tajik government’s anti- monopoly agency failed to respond to a request to approve the Tcell deal before a deadline set by Telia, forcing it to void the sale of its 60% stake in the company to the Aga Khan Fund for Economic Development (AKFED).
In a statement, Emil Nilsson, head of the Eurasia region for Telia, said that the company had now written off the value of Tcell’s assets, which it put at $13m, although it was still looking for an alternative buyer.
“We have taken all relevant actions in trying to close the deal. The proposed buyer of our interest in Tcell, AKFED, is an established investor in the region with multiple companies in its current portfolio and a long history in Tcell,” he said. “We are now assessing alternative ownership solutions for Tcell.”
Neither the Tajik government nor the Aga Khan have commented.
Telia has been looking to sell its units in Central Asia and the South Caucasus after a corruption probe in 2012/3 discovered it had paid a bribe of several hundred million dollars five years earlier to Gulnara Karimova, daughter of Uzbekistan’s then president Islam Karimov, in exchange for market access. Karimov died last year and Ms Karimova has been under house arrest in Tashkent since 2014.
The corruption scandal tarnished Telia’s reputation in the region. Netherlands-based MTS and Norway’s Telenor were also mired in the bribe-paying controversy.
Afterwards, in a damming indictment for companies operating in the region, Telia said the business environment in Central Asia was too riddled through with corruption that reputational damage was inevitable. It was better, the company had concluded, to sell its stakes in Tcell, Kcell (Kazakhstan), Ucell (Uzbekistan), Azercell (Azerbaijan) and Geocell (Georgia) than to risk more reputational damage.
The Aga Khan already owned a 40% stake in Tcell and had agreed to buy Telia’s stake in September last year.
In January, though, Telia accused the Tajik government of trying to pressure it into paying an unmerited tax bill and in February it said it had asked the anti-monopoly unit for a meeting to discuss why it hadn’t yet approved the deal with the Aga Khan.
A Conway Bulletin correspondent in Dushanbe confirmed that the Tcell network was operating as normal.
ENDS
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(News report from Issue No. 323, published on April 6 2017)
