The National Unity Government’s (NUG) acting president, Duwa Lashi La, has called on the prime minister of Norway to intervene to prevent the sale of the Myanmar arm of telecoms firm Telenor to a junta-linked company.
In an open letter to Jonas Gahr Støre on Thursday, the acting president said Norway’s government should use its position as Telenor’s majority shareholder to place a request for the decision to sell to be reversed or deferred.
“In our cabinet meeting, the National Unity Government of Myanmar decided that the sale… is not acceptable and should not be approved,” he wrote.
Norway’s government should instruct Telenor to “ignore any decisions made by the illegitimate military regime,” he added.
Telenor Myanmar is due to be sold to Lebanon’s M1 Group this month. M1, which has been criticised for working with despotic regimes worldwide, will then transfer a majority stake in the venture to a Myanmar firm with strong ties to the military named Shwe Byain Phyu, industry sources have told Myanmar Now.
The sale will see Telenor hand over the sensitive personal data of its more than 18 million subscribers, including the times, dates and locations of calls and text messages, information the junta can use to target its opponents.
Both Telenor and M1 have refused to confirm that Shwe Byain Phyu will be the eventual majority owner of the new venture. An M1 spokesperson told Myanmar Now on Friday that the deal with Telenor was “confidential”.
“No third party is involved in this agreement,” the spokesperson said, though they did not deny industry insiders’ reports that a third party is due to be brought in after the agreement is finalised.
“We look forward to sharing more information about the identity of the new entity, the ownership structure and the brand name that will eventually take over Telenor’s Myanmar operations in due course, once the regulatory process is finalised,” the spokesperson said.
Industry sources have told Myanmar Now that Telenor is “rushing” to get regulatory approval for the sale this week.
Leaked documents show the final owner of Telenor Myanmar will be Investcom Myanmar, a joint venture between M1 and Shwe Byain Phyu, which previously worked with a military-owned firm to import petrol to Myanmar.
In a letter sent earlier this month to Telenor, seen by Myanmar Now, the junta’s telecoms regulator discussed the ownership structure of Investcom Myanmar, saying it would be majority-owned by Shwe Byain Phyu.
An M1 subsidiary and Shwe Byain Phyu jointly own a Singapore-based company named Investcom Pte, files published by the country’s Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority show.
M1’s spokesperson declined to comment on the company’s relationship to Shwe Byain Phyu.
“We cannot comment on rumours, speculations or ongoing negotiations. Should the regulatory decision come out in our favour, we will announce the structure,” they said.
Myanmar Now’s industry source said this week that Shwe Byain Phyu will own between 70 and 80 percent of the new venture, with the remaining shares held by M1.
“We can’t confirm or deny this information, which is speculative and premature at this stage, especially before the regulatory approval,” the spokesperson said.
Telenor wrote off its Myanmar business at a cost of $782 million in May last year and announced the sale to M1 for $105 million in July.
On Monday, a Myanmar citizen filed a data privacy complaint against Telenor with the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, accusing the firm of breaching the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation and seeking to halt the transfer of sensitive data in the sale.
The Netherlands-based Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO), which is supporting the complaint, said that Norway has a responsibility to prevent a junta-linked company from gaining control of the personal data of Myanmar users.
Pro-democracy activists, human rights defenders, and journalists were among those at risk from the data being transferred.
In July, SOMO filed a complaint against Telenor with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on behalf of hundreds of Myanmar civil society organisations, accusing the company of “irresponsible disengagement” from the country and alleging that the sale violated OECD standards outlining the requirements for a responsible exit.
M1 said it would abide by Myanmar’s law, though one observer noted that this was less than reassuring given that the military junta has control of the country’s legal infrastructure.
“M1 will not facilitate unlawful interception requests by anyone in any country,” the company spokesperson said.
The company would abide by the military-drafted 2008 constitution and the 2017 Law Protecting the Privacy and Security of Citizens, the spokesperson added.
The NUG last year declared that the 2008 constitution had been abolished, while the junta last year amended the 2017 law to give its forces the power to carry out surveillance, searches, arrests and seizures without a warrant.
Oliver Spencer, an advisor for Free Expression Myanmar, said it was not encouraging for M1 to promise to abide by Myanmar’s “deeply repressive laws”.
“Those laws are key to the military’s crackdown on the public. Myanmar’s laws facilitate the invasion of privacy, not protect it,” he told Myanmar Now.
M1 is not a signatory to the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment or its Global Compact, both of which have been around for 20 years, he noted.
The Telenor sale should be “independent, transparent, and accountable” because the operations of telecoms companies are critical to communications, privacy, access to information, and free speech, he said.
“Unfortunately, this sale has been anything but transparent when millions of users don’t even know who exactly is buying,” he added.
