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Staff Correspondent The stock market debut of Grameen Phone is unlikely this year as the country's largest mobile phone operator did not send all required information to the capital market regulator, a senior SEC official said Saturday. "The information GP sent to the commission is not enough. We asked for details," Securities and Exchange Commission chairman Faruq Ahmad Siddiqi told bdnews24.com.
His statement lent credence to a Telenor official comment Friday.
Telenor spokesman Dag Melgaard told Reuters that "the IPO could be this year or next ... at the moment, things are a bit unpredictable."
Faruq said the SEC would make a final decision on the matter after examining all required information about GP.
"It may not be possible for GP to offload share by the end of this year completing the process," he added.
But he did not rule out the possibility of GP's debut in the capital market in December.
Grameen Telecom, controlled by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, holds a 38 percent stake in Bangladesh's largest mobile-phone operator, with Norwegian telecom group Telenor holding 62 percent.
In a statement issued on Thursday after a meeting with the Telenor CEO in the Norwegian capital, Muhammad Yunus said he was considering legal action to wrest full control of the joint-venture Grameenphone from Norway's Telenor ASA.
"The recent activities (of Telenor-controlled management) in Bangladesh leave me with little alternative other than to investigate the possibility of taking legal action," Yunus said.
The company has faced serious charges of anomalies, including international call termination through VoIP. This year, the company has paid Tk 418.4 crore in fine for its alleged involvement in VoIP.
Telecoms regulators BTRC have also sued several of the company's current and previous managers.
Telenor said Yunus had met its management on Thursday, and that "these issues were not discussed at all".
At a news conference in Oslo on Friday evening, however, he said a lawsuit was only a "remote possibility."
"This is not an outcome that we think is necessary," Yunus told the news conference. "It is a possibility, a remote possibility."
"We are not the kind of people to rush to the courts."
In Thursday's statement, the Nobel laureate said Grameen Telecom and Telenor had run into differences over "business ethics and corporate governance".
On the dispute between the owners of the company and Yunus' lack of confidence in the management, the SEC chairman said, "It is up to Telenor and Grameen Telecom. Everything will be examined. Nothing will be skipped."
Yunus alleged that Telenor refused to honour an agreement sealed in 1996 to transfer its majority holding to his Grameen Telecom by 2002.
The company's market share narrowed from 63 percent in 2006 to 47 percent as of June 2008.
In the six-operator market, however, Grameenphone still stays in the leading position with 20.84 million customers followed by Egyptian Orascom Telecom's Banglalink with 10 million customers and Aktel with 7.98 million customers as of July.
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