FM on Bharti-MTN deal failure: 'No big deal'
The much-anticipated deal between India's Bharti and South Africa's MTN that aimed to merge the two telecom giant has failed yet again. The contentious issue of dual listing proved to be the deal breaker.
No big deal
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said the deal not going through was not such a big deal. Amidst [negotiations between] such big companies, these deals are successful, sometimes they fail. This is part of the game, he said. Mukherjee, however, did not comment on whether politics on the South African side could have thrown a spanner in the works.
Ahead of its time: MCA
Salman Khurshid, the Minister for Corporate Affairs, said the government was looking at the deal with a lot of interest. The deal could have created India Incs global footprint, the minister said, but urged the parties involved to not play the blame game. Possibly, the time for this kind of a merger has not come yet, Khurshid said.
CNBC-TV18 also spoke Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a Rajya Sabha MP who said the dual listing was a basic issue and should have been sorted earlier. It was expected that South Africa would have waived dual listing demand.
The issue is not about the financial logic or industrial logic of this merger that everybody is buying. That all the shareholders are buying. The issue is about the South Africans wanting to maintain the African nature of MTN which is not an unrealistic expectation for a country that is very proud of a company such as MTN. It is a complicated issue and what I suspect going forward is an attempt to create a structure that keeps the national aspirations if I can use the word that may be slightly different capital and corporate structure, he said.
