Monday, August 01, 2005
State to buy a portion of Mobtel?
B92 has received unofficial information that high officials of the Serbian government held a meeting last week to discussing the possibility of buying a portion of the shares of the Mobtel telecommunications company from the Karic family.
Before any more further steps can be made, the ownership issues surrounding Mobtel must be cleared up, since the Arbitration Court in Zurich is still looking over the case of whether the Austrian Mobilkom company has majority ownership of the company after buying over half of its shares from Bogoljub Karic.
Former Mobtel director Branislav Andjelic said that the government needs to think long and hard before deciding whether the state should buy the portion of the Mobtel company which Karic still owns. He said that borrowing money from a domestic or foreign bank in order to buy Mobtel and then selling the company to foreign investors is also a bad idea.
Andjelic said that the government also needs to look at the large number of new mobile telephone operators that have recently began working and already have a large amount of users in their systems.
It is also important to note that the EU had already asked the Serbian government to end the monopoly it held on mobile services, to make sure that the government did not own both of the largest operators in Serbia.
Before any more further steps can be made, the ownership issues surrounding Mobtel must be cleared up, since the Arbitration Court in Zurich is still looking over the case of whether the Austrian Mobilkom company has majority ownership of the company after buying over half of its shares from Bogoljub Karic.
Former Mobtel director Branislav Andjelic said that the government needs to think long and hard before deciding whether the state should buy the portion of the Mobtel company which Karic still owns. He said that borrowing money from a domestic or foreign bank in order to buy Mobtel and then selling the company to foreign investors is also a bad idea.
Andjelic said that the government also needs to look at the large number of new mobile telephone operators that have recently began working and already have a large amount of users in their systems.
It is also important to note that the EU had already asked the Serbian government to end the monopoly it held on mobile services, to make sure that the government did not own both of the largest operators in Serbia.
