Nitel to Borrow N3Bn from Pension to Pay Salary Arrears

The National Council on Privatisation  has  approved that N3 billion be borrowed from the accounts of Nitel Pension Fund in Liquidation to pay five months salary of workers of the Nigeria Telecommunications Plc (Nitel) and rent for the offices of Nitel and its mobile arm, M-tel.
The decision was taken at its meeting held on November 24, 2009 and chaired by Vice President Goodluck Jonathan.
The payment of staff salaries would be for the backlog of unpaid wages and would be staggered into three tranches.
Staff are expected to get first tranche this week and before Christmas they would receive two months salaries. In January 2010, the workers would receive the balance of two months.
Nonetheless, the remaining arrears of 12 months would be paid from proceeds of sale of Nitel and M-tel.
Following this, the NCP also approved the extended timeline for Nitel transaction which now means that the deadline for submission of financial and technical bids is January 22, 2010.
Recall that the advert for application for receipt of Expressions of Interest (EOIs) from prospective investors for the acquisition of at least 75 % equity in Nigerian Telecommunications Limited was published in July 2009 both in local and international media. Fifteen EOIs were harvested.
The consortia that are pre-qualified for the next stage are expected to pay a non-refundable fee of $25, 000 for bidding documents and execute the confidentiality and non-disclosure agreement.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), as part of the evaluation of the prospective bidders, is expected to conduct a ‘fit and proper’ test on each bidding consortium to participate in the bidding exercise.
In the advertisement, prospective investors were invited to apply to acquire either at least 75 % equity in the entire NITEL conglomerate or a stake in one or several of its components, namely, SAT-3; domestic fixed line telephony; national fibre-optic transmission backbone; CDMA network; and MTEL (GSM);
It also noted that preference would be given to bidders who desire to acquire Nitel fixed lines, transmission backbone, MTEL and SAT-3 components together while those bidding separately for MTEL must be ready to make necessary investments to detach MTEL from the Nitel networks.