Nadaleen Singh

An­tigua wel­comes the US $3 bil­lion merg­er be­tween Ca­ble and Wire­less Cor­po­ra­tion and Colum­bus In­ter­na­tion­al but a reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work must be in place first, Melford Nicholas, the is­land's Min­is­ter of Broad­cast­ing, Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­o­gy said yes­ter­day. He said by next month the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­work should be in place and the li­cense to op­er­ate should be grant­ed.

Nicholas con­firmed that last No­vem­ber, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of CWC and Columbis met with gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials in An­tigua to talk about the pro­posed merg­er.

"Ba­si­cal­ly, the pend­ing merg­er does no vi­o­lence at all to the de­vel­op­ment of our ICT space. As a con­se­quence, it has our tac­it' ap­proval be­cause An­tigua is on the cusp of en­act­ing new leg­is­la­tion gov­ern­ing telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion.I have in­di­cat­ed to them that while pro­vi­sion­al­ly we have no dif­fi­cul­ties with the merg­er, we are not go­ing to be in a po­si­tion to of­fer any new li­cense, un­til we have com­plet­ed the leg­isla­tive and reg­u­la­to­ry process."

Nicholas, who is at­tend­ing the Caribbean Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Union's 25th An­niver­sary ICT Week at the Hy­att Re­gency in Port-of-Spain, ex­pressed his sup­port for one ICT space in the Caribbean.

"All of the par­tic­i­pat­ing car­ri­ers do en­joy cer­tain ben­e­fits in terms of op­er­at­ing in that sin­gle eco­nom­ic space, and I think it is time that the con­sumers en­joy that as well. Ob­vi­ous­ly where there are is­sues of tax­a­tion and the ser­vices that the con­sumer con­sumes, those tax­es would cer­tain­ly be ap­plic­a­ble in a lo­cal lev­el.