Ooredoo Group has decided to bid for the insolvent owner of Turkey’s biggest telecommunications company to rival an offer from Saudi operator STC, Bloomberg reports citing three unnamed sources familiar with the matter. Ooredoo will bid to acquire Ojer Telekomunikasyon or Otas, a special purpose vehicle that owns 55 percent of Turk Telecom, while the Saudi proposal also remains on the table, the sources said.
A purchase by Ooredoo would extend the company’s record of expanding to serve about 150 million customers from Algeria to Myanmar, largely through acquisitions. The plan by STC, which owns 35 percent of Otas’s parent, Oger Telecom, involves buying the company via a USD 750 million cash injection and committing to restructure a further USD 4 billion of debt.
In Turkey’s largest syndicated loan default, Otas missed three payments since September 2016 on USD 4.75-billion it borrowed from 29 local and international banks in 2013. Creditors including Akbank TAS, Turkiye Garanti Bankasi and Turkiye Is Bankasi hired Lazard and Raiffeisen Investment to help with negotiations over the loan, according to people familiar with the plan. Other parties to the talks are the Turkish Treasury, which has a 25 percent stake in Turk Telecom and Saudi Telecom.
The pursuit of the Turkish asset comes as the standoff between Qatar and its neighboring Gulf States show no sign of letting up. The United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt cut diplomatic relations and closed transport routes with Qatar in June, accusing the nation of funding terrorism, a charge it denies.
The Turkish Treasury gave Otas 60 days from early August to find a solution to the debt situation and warned that it might exercise its right under a shareholders agreement to take control of Turk Telekom’s management, people familiar with the matter have said.
