Billed out

A telco that has spent years fighting the government over its fees is at it again, and this time, Nosy Tarsee learned, the bill is big enough that the protest has reached the stock exchange.

Regulator National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) sent the telco a demand letter dated 9 September, saying the company owed more than P4 billion in supervision and regulation fees, penalties included, and gave it until 30 September to pay up.

The sum covered several years through 2026 and rested on a 21 April Supreme Court ruling that went against the telco.

But the telco did not pay by the deadline. Instead, on 9 October, it wrote to the NTC and the Department of Information and Communications Technology asking them to go back to 2005 and recompute everything year by year because it believed the NTC used the wrong base figures.

At the heart of the fight was how the NTC treated the telco’s additional paid-in capital, which the telco said didn’t match its audited books, and it wanted to know how much of its 2004 capital was counted again in later years.

It also asked for a full schedule of the charges, a corrected statement of account, and a sit-down between the NTC’s staff and its finance and legal people.

The NTC refused, so the P4 billion still nags at the telco like a bill on the table. If the NTC holds its ground, the telco will have to take the cash from the money that would have gone to towers, fiber and network upgrades, and nobody in the sector can say it will be the last company told to settle old accounts.

Meanwhile, the listed company that holds a stake in the telco said in its filing that the debt was the telco’s alone, since the two are separate firms in the eyes of the law.

The listed firm, nonetheless, is bearing the backlash of the heavy bill, which is cutting the value of its investment in the bourse and otherwise.