And Yet Another Fine For MTN; Only This Time Its In Uganda

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.