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Weekly Lists
July 6, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 30
bne:TMT Turkish banks to take
over bankrupt Turk Telekom
Turkish banks will call in $4.75bn worth of debt and take control of Turk Telekom, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources close to the deal.
The majority (around 90%) of the company’s creditors have voted to set up a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to take ownership of the Ojer Telekomunikasyon AS, or Otas, which is the holding for the operator.
The remaining 10% have also informally agreed to the deal and are expected to formally accept it.
The ownership of the SPV will be dived between the crediting banks in proportion to their share of the debt that was made to Otas, sources say.
The international lenders in the pool are setting up a second SPV to own their proportional stake in the mooted SPV for tax reasons.
Bulgaria’s ruling coalition backed a controversial law aiming to reveal media owners in the country in its first reading on July 4. The law was written by media mogul Delayn Peevski, who is also an MP from the ethnic-Turk Movement for Rights and Freedom (DPS).
The law, proposed by Peevski several months earlier, raised con- cerns among publishers that it aims to clear the image of the con- troversial businessman and not to reveal the actual situation with media ownership in the country.
In April, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranked Bulgaria lowest in the EU terms of media freedom in its 2018 report. The NGO called Peevski the “most notorious embodiment” of the corruption and collusion between media, politicians, and oligarchs in the country.
Browser company Opera filed for an IPO in the US, planning to raise up to $115mn, according to reports on June 4.
The company made $129mn in revenues and net income of $6.1mn in 2017. Opera has about 182mn monthly active users across its mobile products, 57.4mn monthly active users for its desktop browser and 90.2mn users for Opera News in its browsers and standalone app, according to TechCrunch.
"The story is making headlines in Russia because, while we know that Yandex has been paying Opera to make it the preferred brows- er partner in Russia, the exact amount was unknown," BCS Global Markets said in a note on July 4.
Bulgaria’s ruling coalition, opposition DPS back controversial legislation on media ownership
Yandex-affiliated browser Opera files for IPO in US