Advertisement
Advertisement

Lai See

Ben Kwok

Busy line-up for Richard Li's lawyers

There is one thing to be said about PCCW chairman Richard Li Tzar-kai; he certainly knows how to keep lawyers busy.

With the latest innings in the privatisation battle being played out in the Court of Appeal, the PCCW lawyers will be going into bat again next week to try to prevent the telecommunications giant from losing as much as HK$400 million a year in revenue.

From April 27, the inter-operator charge that is paid to fixed-line operators by their mobile-telephone counterparts will be scrapped.

In other words, the estimated HK$650 million fee income that was paid to all fixed-line operators last year - PCCW is the most dominant player - could evaporate overnight under a new arrangement which will take into account the change in the public's telecommunications habits.

Any new charge will be subject to negotiations among the operators, but if they cannot agree on a deal, it will be decided by the Office of the Telecommunications Authority.

It is understood that most non-PCCW operators are prepared to forgo their interconnection charges.

One telecommunications observer we spoke to believes PCCW will still charge other operators although it will have to accept a substantial decline in the fee.

But Mr Li does have experience on his side as his lawyers have been fighting pretty much the same war over all kinds of inter-connection charges for the past decade.

Courting attention

There have been some interesting faces turning up at Technology Court over the past couple of days.

We spotted an HSBC executive who was probably there to report on the progress of the case as the bank is the sole lender of HK$17 billion to PCCW's majority shareholders - Richard Li Tzar-kai and China Unicom - for the buyout.

Also in the courtroom were two hedge fund guys we believe have a certain amount of exposure to the stock. They were in the area reserved for minority shareholders.

Later, we spotted three teenagers in jeans who wandered in to watch proceedings on the giant video screen on the wall outside the courtroom. However, they only stayed for a few minutes before heading off for lunch.

Media logged off

So much for the Technology Court - part two. On Thursday, it was the sound system for the video screen that was found wanting. Yesterday, it was the lack of a broadband service.

Our reporter took his laptop, plugged in the cable in the hope of logging on to the internet only to find that he could not access the broadband network. He was later told by the clerk that access was not available in the media area because if all the reporters there started using computers, the sound of typing would disturb proceedings.

As it was, they were still having problems with the sound system in the courtroom yesterday.

The clerk stressed that the Technology Court was only being used because the big screen could be made available outside for the expected overspill.

Mailbox blues

Our quote of the week couldn't come from anywhere else but the courtroom.

It belongs to Mr Justice Anthony Rogers, one of the three Appeal Court judges who was asked by a minority shareholder to recuse himself from hearing the privatisation case because he once wrote a customer complaint to PCCW chairman Richard Li.

In explaining the dispute, Mr Justice Rogers said: 'I found it outrageous that genuine e-mails were being bounced and held in the spam box. The situation still didn't improve, so I then made quite sure my e-mails didn't go through Netvigator any more.'

Post