CAIRO: Egypt's Capital Markets Authority delayed Friday its ruling on the obligatory tender offer by France Telecom's Orange for all shares in Mobinil (Egyptian Company for Mobile Services). The CMA said it has reviewed the documents submitted by Orange and requested more data in order to move forward with studying the offer, the market regulator's Hisham Ibrahim said in a statement sent to Daily News Egypt. The authority also lifted its three-day suspension of trade on Mobinil and Orascom Telecom (OT) shares on the Egyptian Stock Exchange. Both companies' shares will be traded normally when the market opens Sunday May 24. OT and France Telecom own a holding company with a 51 percent stake in Mobinil and the Egyptian stock exchange suspended trade in both OT and Mobinil shares from Tuesday after the CMA said it was examining the FT offer. On Wednesday OT's Naguib Sawiris told Reuters, "We believe this reaction from the CMA is not sustainable and they should let our shares trade or announce the details of the offer, he said. Though the statement did not provide further details on what kind of information was missing from the offer, Bloomberg reported the CMA needed clarifications about the method Orange used to set the share price. France Telecom's Orange unit offered to buy all of Mobinil's shares last week, after which OT requested that a Cairo court rescind the March 10 share sale agreement of the arbitration award, citing FT's failure to pay the shares' price in time. After years of wrangling in court between the two sides, an international arbitration court ruled earlier this year that that OT sell its 51 percent stake in Mobinil's holding company to FT OT continues to tow a hard line on FT's bid, saying that it has failed to pay the price of the shares by the time stipulated in the arbitration award.
