CAIRO: The parent company of Egypt's Orascom Telecom (OT) will call off a $6 billion-plus deal with Vimpelcom if Vimpelcom shareholder Telenor blocks a vote on the tie-up next month, OT's chief executive said. Norwegian telecoms group Telenor has applied for an injunction to prevent a dilution of its stake in Russia's Vimpelcom if the deal to buy OT and an Italian telecoms firm gets voted through in a shareholder meeting on March 17. The injunction would require Vimpelcom to issue Telenor with pre-emptive rights to acquire more shares at the same time that Vimpelcom issues shares to OT parent Wind Telecom if that acquisition was completed. "(Wind Telecom) will not complete the merger deal ... in (the) case the resolution of the deal does not take place (at the) end of March as it took Wind Telecom a long time, between 10 and 11 months, to complete the deal," Khaled Bichara, the chief executive of both OT and Wind Telecom, told newspaper Al Youm Al Sabie in a statement. A London court is due to hear Telenor's injunction request on Feb. 25. Bichara told Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore this month that OT was continuing to work on the deal with Vimpelcom and said it would not lead to a merger at the operating level. He said at the time that Orascom and Wind were not worried if Telenor convinced enough Vimpelcom shareholders to block the tie-up, and the new group could press ahead with its plans even if the deal is not completed.
