SINGAPORE-What was to have been one of the most glorious moments in Singapore’s telecommunications history turned out to be a major fiasco in April when one of the tenderers for a new Singapore mobile phone license, United States-based GTE Corp., said it wanted no part of it.
Just one day after the government announced it would award a cellular license to P2P Communications, one of the consortium’s purported partners, GTE, turned around and claimed it was never a part of the winning team.
That revelation not only put the P2P consortium members, NatSteel Ltd. and Teledata Ltd. in a bad light, it also resulted in many people questioning the integrity of the nation’s tender-evaluation standards. So much so that Communications Minister Mah Bow Tan had to defend the government’s tender-evaluation process, saying the episode had not compromised the integrity of such standards and that everything was done with “full transparency and was totally aboveboard.”
The events-shocking by Singapore standards-started unfolding 24 April, just one day after the government announced it would award P2P Communications, as well as the British Telecommunications plc-led StarHub consortium, mobile phone licenses, which were due to be effective on 1 April 2000.
Instead of popping the champagne, GTE firmly denied association with the P2P team, saying it was only a “technical consultant and equipment supplier” to the group and had only agreed to “consider” taking a 30-percent stake in the company should P2P be awarded a license. It later added that it had indicated to the Telecommunications Authority of Singapore (TAS) as well as P2P members as early as January this year that it had no intention of taking up the stake.
But P2P’s NatSteel and Teledata expressed shock at GTE’s comments. Teledata’s managing director told reporters he was surprised at GTE’s denial since no advance warning had been given. He added that GTE officials had only just left the island after meeting with Teledata executives, so “this comes as a complete shock.”
As the botch-up unfolded, the TAS issued a terse warning to P2P requiring them to sort out their shareholding problems within three days. It added that if P2P was found to have deliberately misrepresented its case to the tender-evaluation committee, it could have its license revoked and could also be barred from all future tenders.
On 27 April, the phone-license fiasco took a new turn when TAS said it would not award P2P the cellular license after all. Even more surprising was the fact that NatSteel and Teledata had said in a statement issued just 20 minutes before the TAS statement that they would not accept the license since it was unable to form the consortium as proposed in its bid submission.
Teledata Managing Director Han Meng Siew explained: “As the award is contingent on GTE being an equity partner and we are now unable to form the consortium as proposed in our submission, we have decided not to accept the award of the license.”
But the stripping of the license did not spell the end of P2P’s troubles. According to Singapore laws, if P2P is found to have deliberately misrepresented its case, it could not only be barred from all future telecommunications tenders, but also from all government contracts.
Meanwhile, the nation’s remaining three cellular operators-SingTel Mobile, MobileOne (Asia) Pte. Ltd. and StarHub, expressed relief at P2P’s license loss, saying that a three-operator scenario, as opposed to a four-operator one, greatly boosted their business cases.
New operator StarHub includes NTT of Japan, local government-owned ST Telecommunications and Singapore Power, as well as BT.
