Telecom Lead India: Real estate major Unitech, a minority
joint venture partner of Telenor in India, has approached the Company Law Board
(CLB) seeking a stay on auctioning Uninor Wireless.
Unitech owns 32.75 percent equity stake in Uninor Wireless.
Unitech requested CLB to stay the auction as the real
estate firm feared that Telenor may possibly be the only bidder. Unitech also
sought a restraint on any sale or transfer of business and assets of Uninor.
Uninor has set a minimum price of Rs 4,000 crore for the India telecom business
and said Telenor would pay Rs 4,190 crore in case no other bidder evinces
interest by August 6.
Telenor, which recently decided to scale down operations in India, will scrap the joint venture
with real estate major Unitech and migrate its business to a new company to
seek fresh operating licences.
Unitech requested the CLB to restrain Telenor and its associates from giving
any effect to the auction process, for which notices were published in
newspapers yesterday.
Unitech application will be listed for hearing on Friday, PTI reported.
Unitech has challenged the authenticity of the July 31 board meeting of Uninor,
in which a resolution for hiving of the telecom business was passed.
The company claimed it had vetoed the proposal at the board meeting.
Unitech in the application said five people had physically attended the July 31
board meeting. Of these three, were from Unitech representatives and two from
Telenor. Two directors — Richard Oo Alav and Ragnur Karnhus, attended the
meeting from France and Oslo through video conferencing.
However, no video recording was done by Uninor despite the directions of the
Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) to record in case of any directors attending
the meeting through video conferencing.
Unitech said if the meeting was valid, then the resolution seeking auction of
Uninor business was defeated as its three nomineed directors had vetoed it and
only two nominees of Telenor voting in its favor. Accordingly, the resolution
was defeated by majority.
