Nadaleen Singh

In­vestors are be­ing sought for TSTT as plans are on tar­get for com­ple­tion of di­vest­ment of Ca­ble and Wire­less Com­mu­ni­ca­tions' (CWC) stake in the com­pa­ny by year end.Chris Seecher­an, CEO of the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Au­thor­i­ty of T&T (TATT), told the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day that there were no longer any CWC di­rec­tors on TSTT's board. He said this meant the two com­pa­nies were now sep­a­rate from an op­er­a­tional stand point.

Seecher­an said one of the con­di­tions which TATT had re­quest­ed be­fore ap­prov­ing the merg­er of CWC and Colum­bus Com­mu­ni­ca­tions late last year was fre­quent up­dates on the di­vest­ment process. "CWC and NEL (Na­tion­al En­ter­pris­es Ltd), on be­half of Gov­ern­ment, ap­point­ed fi­nan­cial ad­vi­sors who are work­ing with them in or­der to put to­geth­er–I am us­ing the word prospec­tus–in or­der to at­tract a suit­able in­vestor in­to TSTT," he said.

In the in­ter­im, he said: "TSTT is in­volved in pro­duc­ing re­vised plans/fore­casts. Some sort of a vir­tu­al li­brary as it were, has been cre­at­ed where po­ten­tial in­vestors can go in and look at doc­u­ments, look at fore­casts.

"The cur­rent sched­ule is that by De­cem­ber there­abouts they should have re­ceived pro­pos­als which hope­ful­ly could then be re­viewed. Ear­ly in­to the new year we will see a way for­ward in terms of iden­ti­fy­ing a po­ten­tial in­vestor."Seecher­an said the process had been on­go­ing "be­hind the scenes" and TATT had giv­en CWC a time frame of one year to com­plete the di­vest­ment with a pos­si­ble ex­ten­sion of up to six months.

"So far they are with­in the processed time­line. The process has start­ed and it is go­ing well from what we un­der­stand. As you know we are not part of the process. We want­ed to be in­formed.Seecha­ran said TATT would make an an­nounce­ment when the di­vest­ment process was com­plet­ed.

In an im­me­di­ate re­sponse, the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Work­ers Union (CWU), the union that rep­re­sents TSTT work­ers, said it would make a state­ment on the mat­ter next week. CWU pres­i­dent Joseph Re­my said the union want­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty to make rec­om­men­da­tions on the in­vest­ment of the 49 per cent shares.

As though high­ly crit­i­cal of TATT's han­dling of the CWC/Colum­bus merg­er, Re­my said he was pleased with TATT's ap­proach to TSTT.

In late March, TATT gave con­di­tion­al ap­proval of the merg­er, say­ing it would de­pend on CWC's readi­ness to sus­pend its share­hold­er rights with re­gard to its 49 per cent stake in ma­jor­i­ty state-owned TSTT, among oth­er con­di­tions. At the time, TSTT, this coun­try's largest telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vice provider, was joint­ly owned by NEL on be­half of the Gov­ern­ment (51 per cent), and and Ca­ble & Wire­less (49 per cent).

TATT had said then that an "in-depth eco­nom­ic and le­gal analy­sis" of the im­pli­ca­tions of the trans­ac­tion on the lo­cal tele­com mar­ket "found that sub­stan­tial less­en­ing of com­pe­ti­tion or ad­verse ef­fects may rea­son­ably be ex­pect­ed to re­sult from the pro­posed ac­qui­si­tion of Colum­bus by CWC."Plans for the CWC/Colum­bus were first an­nounced on No­vem­ber 6 last year and on March 31 the two com­pa­nies an­nounced its fi­nal­i­sa­tion.