- September 5th, 2008
- 5:56 am
Telenor Norway may face a lawsuit as the Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus may sue the telecom group, which, reportedly, was in a bid to gain a full control over the Grameenphone.
Grameenphone was founded by Telenor and Grameen Telecom 12 years back and was launched by Yunus and Telenor owns 62% of the Grameenphone.
Yunus has always mentioned about a deal in which Telenor has agreed on transferring it’s share in Grameenphone to the company, to which Telenor has stated the deal invalid.
“I hope that a lawsuit will prove to be unnecessary, because Telenor’s owners will demand that the company is standing by the intention which was communicated in 1996 about transferring ownership and control through Grameenphone to the poor in Bangladesh,” said Yunus.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Grameenphone, Bangladesh’s biggest mobile operator, has approved plans for the country’s largest initial public offering. Grameenphone,62 percent owned by Telenor and 38 percent owned by local Grameen Telecom, is expected to apply to list on the country’s two main stock exchanges by the end of the month.
It plans to raise 300 million dollars through the IPO, half by floating shares on the Dhaka and Chittagong bourses and the other half by selling pre-IPO shares.
Wireless Mobile Telecom Wireless News
Telegeography writes…Norwegian telco Telenor has refused to sell part of its 62% stake in Bangladesh’s leading mobile operator GrameenPhone to its minority partner, Grameen Telecom. The domestic firm’s head Muhammad Yunus previously claimed that Telenor had promised to yield management control of GrameenPhone, and earlier last week he told a Norwegian newspaper that Grameen Telecom would pay Telenor USD427 million for a 13% stake in the GSM operator to give it a majority interest. ‘I’m disappointed,’ Yunus told reporters after meeting Telenor’s management in Oslo, where he was attending an economic conference. ‘I was hoping we would discuss the issues I’ve been talking about in the media and find an opening…[but] nothing really has changed,’ he said. Telenor maintains it is under no obligation to relinquish control of GrameenPhone.
Wireless Mobile Telecom
- January 8th, 2007
- 3:25 pm
Telegeography writes…The head of Grameen Bank, Muhammad Yunus, announced on Friday that he intends to take majority control of Bangladeshi mobile market leader GrameenPhone, in order to better serve the country’s poor. GrameenPhone was launched in 1996 and is 62%-owned by Norway’s Telenor, with the other 38% held by Grameen Bank’s non-profit organisation Grameen Telecom, but Yunus said that the company was originally intended to be controlled by domestic investors. The financier was speaking to the press upon arrival in Oslo where he and a representative of the bank were presented with the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize on Sunday for their pioneering of the ‘microcredit’ concept of small loans for rural entrepreneurs. Based on the microcredit model, GrameenPhone’s Village Phone programme distributes GSM phones, mainly to women who set up public payphone businesses in poor rural communities. At the end of August 2006, according to TeleGeography’s GlobalComms database, there were more than 253,000 Village Phones in operation in over 50,000 villages across the country, up from the December 2004 total of 95,000 operators in 28,000 villages. Telenor has said that no agreement exists to hand over control of GrameenPhone to Grameen Telecom, and that it has ploughed ‘almost all its profits’ back into the company to the good of the country. At the end of September 2006, GrameenPhone had 9.4 million mobile subscribers, or 54% of the market.
Wireless Mobile Telecom
Telenor Norway may face lawsuit by Nobel Prize winner (Bangladesh)
