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Turkey’s Turkcell In Big Dispute with TeliaSonera of Scandinavia


A key official from Çukurova Holding — the only Turkish shareholder of Turkey’s largest GSM operator, Turkcell İletişim Hizmetleri A.Ş. — has said the company’s foreign partners, Scandinavian TeliaSonera and Russian Altimo, are actually trying to prevent Turkcell’s expansion into Africa as they seek to take over control of the company.

Speaking to Today’s Zaman on condition of anonymity, the official argued that the two foreign companies have embarked on a persistent campaign “based on lies” to reshape the company’s board of directors so as to impact ownership of Turkcell and, subsequently, its decision-making mechanisms. “We were going to purchase GSM operating licenses in 24 African nations and let the company fly. The [Turkish exporters] companies are going there. Turkish Airlines [THY] is going to grow on the continent. And we were going to take the mobile phone operating business.

We were going to become number one in Africa. Even the worth of the services we would outsource was going to be millions of dollars. They simply do not want us to enter Africa,” the official said.

TeliaSonera has a 37.1 percent stake as the main shareholder of Turkcell İletişim Hizmetleri A.Ş., but it cannot control the company because a special purpose company, Turkcell Holding A.Ş., holds 51 percent of Turkcell İletişim. A total of 53 percent of Turkcell Holding is owned by a Çukurova-Altimo partnership and 47 percent by TeliaSonera. Çukurova and Altimo each hold about 13 percent of Turkcell İletişim.

Presently, Turkcell İletişim’s board has seven members, and all three partners are represented by two members each on the board of directors. Mehmet Emin Karamehmet, the founder of Turkcell İletişim and chairman of Çukurova, stepped down in February of last year as Turkcell İletişim’s board chairman after almost 17 years and was replaced by Colin Williams, who has served as an independent board member since May 2006.

What TeliaSonera and Altimo are reportedly trying to do is increase the number of members on the company’s board of directors from seven to nine and the number of independent members there from one to three. Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) government, however, seems to have sided with preserving the present member distribution on the board of directors of the country’s largest mobile phone operator.

In October of last year, the company’s non-Turkish partners were disappointed as a related decision could not be made because commissioners from the Industry and Trade Ministry did not participate in a congress. It is now certain that the upcoming congress on April 21 will host heated debates and tactical wars between the three partners as to who will have the ultimate say over the company’s future plans.

Tricks over independent members

The Çukurova Holding official who spoke to Today’s Zaman drew attention to another dimension of the present board members’ dispute. He says the company’s foreign partners are seeking to take control of the company through people who they say will be independent. “Julian Horn-Smith, whom they proposed as an independent member, is also on the board of directors of our competitor Vodafone. He is also a paid consultant at Altimo’s umbrella holding Alfa. How on the earth is he independent? Can such a person be accepted? They lie without being ashamed of it,” Today’s Zaman’s source said.

When asked why Turkcell’s foreign partners are also striving to replace Williams with someone else, the same official said: “We are curious about that, too. They would [like to] sue the guy. He brought the general congress agenda to be discussed by the board three times; yet, the members did not make any request to increase their number of colleagues. What else should Williams do?”

On the particular issue of the claim raised by TeliaSonera’s CEO Lars Nyberg that Çukurova sold the same shares to both TeliaSonera and Altimo, the official insisted that this claim is untrue and that those shares were sold only to Altimo and that TeliaSonera did not make any payment for them. “In order for Nyberg to say ‘they sold,’ he also has to explain how much he paid for those shares. Did you sign the deal? No. We went [to offer those shares to TeliaSonera] twice before we sold them to the Russians. We told them that we hadn’t yet taken any money from the Russians and that they [the TeliaSonera] could buy those shares. They did not respond to us within 60 days and we sold those shares to the Russians because we had to [under those circumstances.] From our point of view, they are doing 50 or more tricks at the same time. We are fed up with all this,” the official said.

The same official also raised allegations of corruption against TeliaSonera in remarks to Today’s Zaman. He claimed that TeliaSonera has embezzled millions of dollars of Turkcell’s revenue, causing financial losses for its shareholders in Turkey and the US since the company’s shares are traded on both the İstanbul Stock Exchange (İMKB) and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

In his explanation of the allegation, the Scandinavian joint venture caused Kcell — a Kazakh mobile phone operator owned by Fintur Holdings, a TeliaSonera-Turkcell partnership company — to make less profit than it could have made otherwise by forging fake bills that stated the Kazakh company had purchased services from the Swedish telecommunications giant Ericsson, though in fact it did not. “Every time we ask them why they did not pay any dividends to shareholders, they say the company had outstanding debts. Now we understand how its money used to evaporate. They embezzled the very money we and small shareholders were entitled to. We will bring this up at the [April 21] congress,” the official said.

15 April 2011
 
aus der Diskussion: Turkcell - Mobilfunk Türkei
Autor (Datum des Eintrages): R-BgO  (20.07.11 15:28:03)
Beitrag: 8 von 57 (ID:41816915)
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