Oh not MTN again! This time its Uganda. AFK Insider is reporting that MTN is appealing a $660,000/131m Naira/67m KES fine by a Ugandan court for “sabotaging” a mobile business. You’ll recall that MTN received its biggest fine ever from Nigeria where it was asked to pay a $5.2b/1.4tr Naira fine for unregistered SIM cards. This was immediately followed by a probe by South African authorities for insider trading which has seen its shares fall and CEO resign as a result. The Ugandan court said MTN acted unlawfully by engaging in anti-competitive activities which ultimately led to the death of the mobile money business EzeeMoney. We also learned that Ezeemoney and MTN were initial partners with MTN being the technical delivery partners but backed out because it felt that the company was now a competitor to its own mobile money business but Justice Henry Peter Adonoyo disagrees with this theory in a court statement. He said “I find that by virtue of the defendant (MTN) being in a dominant position in the business (mobile money), which the plaintiff (EzeeMoney) was involved, (MTN) decided to act maliciously, highhandedly, egregiously, vindictively and oppressively towards the plaintiff for no valid legal reasons.”
MTN is going to appeal this judgement according to Chris Maroleng, group executive for corporate affairs.
MTN is the largest telecom company in Africa but has its biggest operations in Nigeria where it has over 62 million subscribers. Across the continent though as of September this year, it had over 233 million subscribers. The company has become a subject of litigations and probes especially with the way it uses its dominance to compete.
The Nigerian regulators (NCC) had at a time suspended telecom operators from some value added services for reasons ranging from quality of service to competition.
Paul Balo is the founder of TechBooky and a highly skilled wireless communications professional with a strong background in cloud computing, offering extensive experience in designing, implementing, and managing wireless communication systems.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
