Bangladesh approves Bharti Airtel’s Warid stake buy
Bangladesh’s telecom regulator approved Bharti Airtel’s proposed $300 million investment in a 70 per cent stake in Abu Dhabi Group’s Warid telecom, the fourth-largest mobile company in the country.
“We have approved Bharti Airtel’s plan to buy the Warid stake,” Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission (BTRC) chairman Zia Ahmed told a local newspaper.
Bharti will take over a 70 per cent stake in Warid by creating new shares, possibly at a nominal price.
“We hope Airtel investment would cross $1 billion within the next few years,” Ahmed said, hinting at his talks with Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman and group chief executive officer of Bharti Enterprises, who recently visited Dhaka.
Ahmed added: “Whatever price Airtel is going to pay for Warid stake, as per law, 5.5 per cent of the deal amount must go to BTRC.”
Bharti Airtel is one of the Asia’s leading providers of telecommunication services with presence in all the 22 licensed jurisdictions in India and in Sri Lanka. It served an aggregate of 113,439,670 customers as of Sep 30, according to the company website.
