Norway's Telenor said on April 03 that it plans to list its GrameenPhone subsidiary on the stock exchange in Bangladesh after rejecting a claim by Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus for control of the telecom firm.
Telenor owns 62 percent of GrameenPhone, Bangladesh's leading mobile phone company with more than 12 million subscribers. It is also the largest private enterprise in Bangladesh.
Grameen Telecom, a unit of the Yunus-founded Grameen Bank, holds the remaining 38 percent and offered last week to buy another 13 percent for 427 million dollars to get a majority stake, Grameen Telecom chief executive Ashraful Hasan said.
It says that was the original proposal under a 1996 agreement by the Norwegian group to cede control of Grameen Phone within six years.
But Telenor's chief executive said in a statement that the firm would rather list an unspecified percentage of the firm on the Dhaka Stock Exchange and rejected the agreement as a statement of intent and not binding.
"A public listing would bring more Bangladeshi ownership into GrameenPhone," Telenor President and Chief Executive Officer Jon Fredrik Baksaas said in a statement.
"We think it is important that the people of Bangladesh and all customers of GrameenPhone can become owners of this successful company," he said.
Bangladesh is one of the world's poorest countries with nearly half of its 144 million population surviving on less than a dollar day.